


in adoration of simple pleasures

by TheGoodDoctor



Category: Historical Farm (UK TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst, Edwardian Period, Friendship, Multi, Period Typical Attitudes, Pining, Slow Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-10-15 12:32:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 45,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17528789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGoodDoctor/pseuds/TheGoodDoctor
Summary: In a leafy lane of DevonThere's a cottage that I know,Then a garden—then, a grey old crumbling wall,And the wall's the wall of heaven(Where I hardly care to go)And there isn't any fiery sword at all.- Alfred Noyes“What your uncle was doing, leaving the whole sorry mess to you, I can’t imagine,” the aunt tuts. Her emphasis makes it rather unclear which part she find less explicable: the bequest, or the recipient. “But the man always was rather odd. Always reading, or digging up a field on some contrived excuse.” Aunt Edwina levels her nephew with a rather pointed glare and he looks quickly away.“I’m sure it won’t take long,” the nephew sidesteps cautiously.





	1. Michaelmas

_4th September, 1910_

_Plymouth_

_MY DEAR SIR,_

_It is my duty to inform you of the unfortunate passing of your uncle, the late John Leslie Lawrence, on the third of this month and to offer to you my condolences. As I have been given to understand, the gentleman and yourself, though related, were not well acquainted and it may therefore be of some surprise to you that, according to the last will and testament of Mr Lawrence, the sum of five thousand pounds and a small farmstead in Morwellham Quay, Devonshire, have been left in your possession. The farm has not been managed for some years now and is in a state of some disrepair; though it is my understanding that you presently live some distance from Devonshire, it would be of use for you to visit your property, that your assets might be better managed. If this should not be at all amenable or possible at the present time, I render my services unto you to manage or sell the property by proxy, as the executor of your late uncle’s will._

_My condolences once again for your loss. I remain_

_Yours, faithfully,_

_William M. Westford, Esq._

_Westford and Sons Solicitors_

* * *

A great gush of steam obscures the platform, swathing people, porters and packages alike in curlicues of white, almost thick and heavy enough to grasp in one’s hand. Through this, one hand clasping his hat to his head against the onslaught of wind and rain and the other clutching a large suitcase and a tweed carpetbag, a young man battles his way into the dry warmth of the train, a ticket caught between his teeth and a much-read envelope tucked into an inside pocket of his jacket. He stows his cases on the rack above his seat, dropping his damp hat with an air of resignation atop the bag, and opens the window.

An austere old lady glares up at him, large black brolly keeping her far drier than the gentleman. “You’ll sort this mess out quickly, won’t you, and come straight back.”

“Yes, Aunt Edwina,” he replies, with the tone of one who has been informed of this several times before.

“What your uncle was doing, leaving the whole sorry mess to you, I can’t imagine,” the aunt tuts. Her emphasis makes it rather unclear which part she find less explicable: the bequest, or the recipient. “But the man always was rather odd. Always reading, or digging up a field on some contrived excuse.” Aunt Edwina levels her nephew with a rather pointed glare and he looks quickly away.

“I’m sure it won’t take long,” the nephew sidesteps cautiously.

Aunt Edwina maintains her glare for a beat, and then huffs. “It had better not, Alex. You know I’ve a mind to introduce you to the Bexleigh girl in November, and it would do well for you to charm her. You could do much worse than her, and you can’t sponge off me forever.”

Alex opens his mouth, as if he might like to point out that he has just inherited a not inconsiderable sum of money and a small property, but thinks better of it. The engine shrieks and there is a tug at Alex’s feet as the locomotive takes the strain and begins to pull out of the station. “A few weeks, Aunt Edwina, that’s all.”

“See that it is!” Aunt Edwina barks as she disappears behind a thick grey curtain of heavy rain and coal smoke.

Alex pulls his head back in, running a hand over his wet hair as he secures the window closed and drops into his seat, slumping inelegantly. The train rocks and rumbles, not quite able to drown out the heavy drumming of rain against the roof, building speed as it gets further and further from Alex’s home, and family, and life up to this point. Raindrops chase each other down the window panes like quicksilver as they catch the light from within the empty compartment against the dark fog and rain without. The darkness outside the compartment’s walls give the effect of total isolation, as if a young man might find himself entirely alone here, without friends or family to guide him.

Alex removes the letter from his pocket, turning it over and over idly in his hands. A young man of some means, completely without instruction and outside the influence of his family.

Alex presses the letter to his lips to hide the wide, wild, triumphant grin which he cannot seem, at present, to shake.

* * *

Mr Westford is, as promised, present to meet him off the train and is also armed with a stout black umbrella, which he is fortunately willing to share. “You’ll have taken rooms in town?” he inquires in a loud local brogue over the noise of the rain.

“I had thought I might take residence on the farm,” Alex replies, not filled with confidence at the look on his solicitor’s face.

“You might,” the man grudgingly concedes, rubbing his round jaw thoughtfully. “It won’t be looking the best, mind, in this weather and it’s not entirely habitable at present, but there’re rooms enough for a short stay. Might be something of an adventure, if you’re up for that sort of thing.”

Alex tries not to show too much enthusiasm. “That sounds perfectly adequate, Mr Westford, thank you.” By the man’s chuckling, he may not have been entirely successful.

The trip up the Tamar is largely uneventful; the steep sides are bright and verdant, even under the grey skies, and there’s a fabulous mystery to the fog hanging thick over the water, like a veil between worlds or the souls of the damned trapped on earth. The effect is somewhat spoiled by the locals, who insist upon very earnestly telling the nice young man from Sussex how much nicer it will all look once it’s stopped raining, even when Alex tries to tell them that he really doesn’t mind it at all.

Morwellham rises through the mist like a spectre, people moving to and fro and losing their dreamlike quality as the boat gets closer. Mooring seems to happen so fast that Alex is being handed out onto the shore before he can quite believe they’ve stopped moving. Westford glances at his face and chuckles again. “You get used to it, lad,” he says, clapping a hand to Alex’s shoulder. “Not quite a bustling metropolis, but folks do their best down here. Now, let me show you your farm.”

 _Come straight back_ , echoes Aunt Edwina’s voice. Alex puts it firmly from his mind, and strides uphill after Mr Westford.

The farm is, as promised, in a state of some disrepair. It’s been uninhabited these ten years at least, the late Mr Lawrence content to let the hedges grow wild and the house collect dust, and it will take a great deal of work before it can be run as an operating farm once more. Alex hasn’t the first idea where to even begin with such work, nor how to manage a farm once the work has been undertaken, and besides, he is to be back in Sussex and wooing the fair Elsie Bexleigh in just two months. It is an impossible undertaking and one he is neither qualified or able to even consider; the farm will have to be sold.

But.

Alex’s hand closes around the heavy iron key to the farmhouse, feels its cold weight in his palm and the icy rain on his face where it whips up under the umbrella on the wicked, twisting wind. He looks at Mr Westford, looking earnestly back at him and saying how nice it would be to get the old farmstead on its feet again - why, when he was a boy, the tenants used to let the young lads of the village weed the fields in return for a ha’penny and a stroke of the draft horses, and he’d dearly like to think of his own lads doing the like. He thinks of the journey here, and how far from his aunt and his terrible cousins and the lovely Miss Bexleigh he is, and the echoes of Aunt Edwina are suddenly not quite so loud, nor so pressing. Mr A. Langlands is a young man of means and some small property, and-

“I intend to stay,” he says, before he can think any better of it, and a smile suffuses over Mr Westford’s round, friendly face. “At least for a while,” the part of him still subservient to his various aunts compels him to add.

Westford nods. “If nothing else, sir, it’ll be easier to sell or let if it’s in a better state.”

“Yes! Yes, quite,” Alex agrees, seizing upon the excuse with delight. “Well, come in, Mr Westford, and we shall see if we can’t manage some tea.”

Tea cannot, as it turns out, be managed. Any attempt to use the stove, despite the enthusiastic efforts of two men allowed to play at building fires and making some kind of camp, merely fills the entire room with smoke and sends them coughing out into the rain.

Westford frowns back in at the kitchen, filled with acrid coal smoke. “Chimney needs clearing, that’s all,” he says bracingly, as if concerned that Alex might at any moment rescind his decision to take on the farm.

Alex squints up at the roof, rain biting on his face and running down his cheeks. “Perhaps I shall have a cold dinner tonight,” he says thoughtfully. “When is the earliest that you suppose I could get the chimney cleared? Tomorrow?”

His solicitor does not respond right away, and Alex looks over to see him staring rather incredulously back. “You’re coming home with me,” he says, before remembering himself and tacking on a rather belated “sir.” Alex frowns - the man has the air of one who has come across something rather wild and a little worrying, like a lost dog or escaped asylum inmate. “You can’t possibly stay here overnight, without any heat, and I was foolish to think you might. In light of that, I should like to invite you to stay in my home until such a time as further acceptable accommodation can be found for you.”

Alex looks back at the dissipating smoke in the kitchen, choking and solid on the cold, damp air. A large icy drop of water rolls off the brim of his hat and slides slowly down the back of his neck. “Thank you, Mr Westford,” he says, putting his precious key into his bag and hefting his cases before turning to grin rather sheepishly at his solicitor. “I should like that very much.”

* * *

The Westfords keep a very pleasant home in a cottage in the village, of similar size to Alex’s own on the farm but inhabited by a great deal more people. Mrs Westford is a tall, sturdy woman with a mass of auburn curls that were doubtless once neatly pinned to her head but now escape in long ringlets about her cheerful, friendly face to be held in the chubby fists of the baby almost permanently affixed to her right hip. The arrangement, though appearing rather constraining to Alex, seems to suit both; Mrs Westford cooks with an aptitude Alex could only dream of, even without the use of one arm, and her baby can stare at everything and everyone with large, calf-like dark eyes. A boy of about six is recruited to haul Alex’s bags up to the spare room while his four-year-old brother hides behind his mother’s skirts until the stranger has been safely relegated to an armchair with his afternoon’s acquisition from the bookseller: _The Book of the Farm._ Thus ensconced, Alex occupies himself while his hosts make supper and the children construct castles and cities with wooden blocks on the rug.

“A letter came this morning, dear, from Ruth,” Mrs Westford tells her husband, once they’ve sat down to eat.

“How is she?” Alex cannot help but notice rather more genuine concern than such a pleasantry usually warrants in Mr Westford’s tone, and busies himself with his food as to not appear overly interested in their affairs.

Mrs Westford sighs. “Putting a tremendously brave face on it, I think. She writes of finding new accommodation, and I worry that she’s not got the money for her present rooms. It’s been three years, Bill, without any money coming in, and I’m sure her husband didn’t leave her so very much in the first place.”

Alex keeps his head down. Financial concerns are not discussed at the tables to which he is accustomed due to their extreme gaucheness, and listening in to the troubles of a woman with whom he is not even acquainted seems exceptionally rude.

Mr Westford pulls a face, unbothered by the guest or subject matter. “I’d say she could come and stay here, love, you know I would, but she ought to be trying for a place in a grand house-”

“Oh, you know she’d hate that!” his wife interrupts, tutting, and Mr Westford heaves a put-upon sigh. Alex gets the impression that this discussion has been had before. “Never out of doors, never seen or heard? Bill,” she chides.

Mr Westford nods unhappily. “I know, you’re right. But she won’t find work elsewhere and she’s not the type to marry again for the sake of it, neither.” Mrs Westford makes an incredulous noise at the thought. “Dare say no one around here needs a housekeeper, else you know I’d recommend her.”

Alex looks at the plate before him. He’s eaten almost all of the food - good, hearty stuff that would keep a man going through hard labour and harsh weather. Nothing on the table is new to him, thanks to the rich dinners of his aunt, and with Henry Stephens’ book by his side he has a fair idea of how to produce at least half of it, but Alex hasn’t ever cooked anything more complicated than scrambled egg on toast. Mrs Westford keeps her cottage brilliantly clean on a budget with which Alex is going to become very familiar, if he really means to stick this out on his five thousand pounds even if only until the farm is on its feet, and he doesn’t really know where to begin.

And. Well.

He’s always been a social creature, even if the society of his life until now has not exactly been to his taste. He’s not cut out for the life of his uncle, hidden away renting rooms on Dartmoor and scarcely seeing a soul the whole year round.

Alex puts down his cutlery neatly and raises his head. “I think I may have a solution.”

* * *

Mrs Goodman resembles her cousin most in the hue of her hair and the line of her nose, but in all other respects the woman who steps off the train appears to be a more concentrated form of Mrs Westford; smaller and more slight, but with an air of intensity and confidence that does little to make Alex’s already rather nervous hat raise any more certain.

She grins brightly upon spotting him and strides down the platform, cases in one hand to extend the other to him in greeting. “Good morning - you must be Mr Langlands.”

“Mrs Goodman.” Her handshake is almost comfortingly firm; Alex has the immediate impression that he could certainly have picked a less capable woman to help him get the farm on its feet. “I trust your journey was no trouble?”

“None at all; I dearly love a good train ride. Shall we see this farm of yours?” she says, smiling.

“Of course,” Alex says. “It’s not far to the dock. Let me take your cases.”

“I thought you were employing me,” she says tartly, and Alex is briefly filled with his usual terror at having unwittingly committed some horrendous faux pas - until he looks at her face and sees her lips twist, eyes dancing and bright with mirth, and relaxes with a small sigh. Mrs Goodman laughs merrily and proffers one case. “There - you may take one, and I’m sorry for teasing you. But really, you could stand to laugh a little more. The dock’s this way, isn’t it?”

Alex blinks in some confusion at her departing form, entirely wrongfooted by the entire exchange. He cannot, however, as he adjusts his grip on her case and sets out at a jog to catch up, seem to shake his smile.

“What state is this place in, then?” Ruth asks as they head up the hill from the river to reach the farmhouse. “Maggie - Mrs Westford - said it needed some work.”

“Ah, yes,” Alex says hesitantly, and Mrs Goodman grins. “Well, it’s not exactly a farm, yet. And I won’t necessarily be staying much past October - Mrs Westford did mention, did she not?”

“She did,” Mrs Goodman says. “I understand you have family to return to.”

“Yes,” Alex says, with little enthusiasm. He’s been three days in Morwellham, with freedom to roam the green landscape and get his hands dirty working on a farm that is entirely his own, and every hour renders Sussex less appealing. “The chimney’s been cleared, and the house deemed habitable, though it will need a clean, I’m afraid.”

“A bachelor living in it alone? Yes, I imagine not much cleaning was done,” Mrs Goodman tuts.

Alex frowns, riled, and then - yes, she’s smiling, and he’s being teased, and he smiles almost reluctantly, huffing in now-pretend irritation. “Well, once it’s clean we ought to be able to move in this evening.”

“And then you’ll be seeing about a crop and livestock, I suppose?” Mrs Goodman asks. Alex hums his agreement as the lane turns and there, before them, is the farmhouse. “Oh, this is rather nice,” she says, and Alex is pleased to note that her appreciation appears entirely genuine. A little niggling knot of worry in his stomach that she might, in the end, not want to help him untangles and dissipates.

“You’ve your own room upstairs, and - oh, your key,” Alex says, fishing in a pocket to produce a spare. “You can come and go as you please, and you may name your day off, and you shall be paid monthly.” Mrs Goodman looks rather incredulously at the proffered key, a hint of amusement in her eyes. “Weekly?” Alex tries hesitantly.

“You haven’t employed help before, have you, Mr Langlands?” she says, definitely amused now.

“No,” Alex admits, rubbing the back of his neck in embarrassment. This, and all other domestic matters, had been affairs taught to and attended by his aunts and female cousins; Alex had been left to more academic schooling, and Plato had left the realm of housekeeper employment sadly neglected.

Mrs Goodman laughs, taking the key. “Monthly pay shall do just fine. I thank you for the key, but I’m not such a social butterfly to be coming and going at all hours, and we’ll see about a day off when I’m sure you can actually manage a meal of your own.”

Alex blinks. He has a feeling he should be somehow exerting some authority, but her proposal is entirely sensible. To be entirely fair, he can’t cook all that well, and - and he’s being wound up again, and it’s taken him just too long to notice, and Mrs Goodman is raising an eyebrow at him in some consternation. “Yes, quite,” he manages, cursing his inability to provide much more than stilted agreements.

“You’ve really not been teased much, have you?” Mrs Goodman says, only now she doesn’t seem so entertained - Alex is almost tempted to say she seems concerned.

“Not for some time, no,” Alex says, before he can think any better of it.

Mrs Goodman appears to mull this over for a moment, and then nods. “Let’s see about some tea.”

She lets Alex into his own home and directs him to sit at the table while she unpacks the crate of equipment and hamper of food enough to set a kettle whistling merrily on the stove, still going from being lit before Alex left. “You’re sure you don’t want any help?” Alex asks as she stores the pots and pans Alex had sent for from town.

She waves a hand. “No, I’ll only do it over again so that everything’s where _I_ think it ought to be,” she says, presenting Alex with a tea cup and a smile. He returns it in thanks as she sits opposite him, sipping from her own cup. “You inherited this farm from your uncle, Maggie tells me.”

“Yes,” Alex says, turning the saucer on the table before him. “No-one knows why, really. We weren’t well acquainted. My aunt supposes it was because he - wasn’t fond of her.”

“And so he bequeathed property to her nephew?” she says, eyebrow raised. “I can think of more direct methods to show disapprobation.”

Alex half-smiles without much amusement to himself. “I think he was hoping I would follow in his footsteps and live like a hermit in darkest Devon. My aunt would very much like the opposite.”

“What would your parents like?”

The question is an innocent one, asked without any particular weight or note and based upon a perfectly normal assumption. It hits Alex like a punch to the chest.

“My parents - ah, they-” he stammers, hearing his aunt’s admonishments: _just spit it out, Alex. No-one wants to hear half-syllables for half an hour._

Mrs Goodman’s hand wraps around his unexpectedly. “Oh, I am sorry.” Alex sighs in relief, shooting her a grateful smile before covering the unexpected display of emotion with a sip of tea. “Well, I suppose I’ll forgive you for not being teased.”

Alex huffs a laugh and she smiles encouragingly back. He feels like he ought to reclaim his fingers from her grasp, but finds he doesn’t want to. Perhaps he’ll leave them for a little longer. “I was teased at university,” he offers. Mrs Goodman laughs, bright eyes dancing, and he continues, unable to help himself. “Mercilessly, by my flatmate. But after we graduated he went - somewhere. I thought he joined the navy, but next I heard he was in the Middle East escaping - slavers, or something.”

“Sounds like your aunt’s dream nephew,” Mrs Goodman grins, and Alex laughs. It’s easier to find her funny now, at this distance, rather than a forbidding force with which to be reckoned, and easier still with a companion determined to see the amusing side, if she possibly can.

She squeezes his hand and lets him go, standing. Alex tries not to miss the contact, because he is a Man, as she begins to consider the half-unpacked hamper. “Thank you, Mrs Goodman,” he says. “For the tea, and - the talk,” he clarifies, when she looks up at him, curious.

She pauses, and then smiles softly. “You are welcome, Mr Langlands. But please, call me Ruth.”

“If you’ll call me Alex,” he returns. It’s been a long time since anyone called him Alex without an air of disapproval, and he finds he’s quite excited about the prospect.

Ruth nods, pleased. “Alex. Now, beef or lamb for supper?”

* * *

It’s just gone Michaelmas, and Alex is in Plymouth just before dawn, leaning against a wall and yawning into the morning mist. He’s waiting on a shipment from Bristol which should come in with the warmth of the morning, so he’d been forced out of bed far earlier than he should have liked to catch the tide down to the coast in the inky pre-dawn dark. There’s something a little enchanting about a world that’s yet to wake and contains, if only for the moment, no-one but oneself. The sky is pinkening above the spires of creaking, snoring ships and the bricks he leans against are transforming slowly from purple to maroon to red; he can hear gulls calling on the breeze, and it’s all Alex’s, just for now.

He breathes in a great lungful of salt-sea-air and tosses an apple idly from one hand to the other. Ruth, looking as half-asleep as he was and hair escaping from last night’s braid, had tossed it at his head before he left, promising greater culinary delights on his return but drawing the line at cooking before half past three in the morning. A week before, he’d not have known where to put his face when confronted by a woman not yet entirely dressed, hair unpinned and still in a nightgown and housecoat - well, he still wouldn’t, were it anyone but Ruth. It’s hard to stand on ceremony when she simply hasn’t the time for it, too busy cooking and cleaning and fussing over his new cows and trying to help him, too, when he’s struggling with jobs that really need four hands, but she’s got half a hundred other things to be getting on with-

Alex reins in that wildly spiralling train of thought in favour of almost dropping his apple in his distraction. In truth, it’s becoming rather difficult for two people of limited experience to manage a family-sized farm, albeit a small one, and Alex is beginning to consider hiring help. The other farms in the area are run by families, who have both lifetimes of experience and a range of family members to rope into chasing rogue sheep and weeding the market garden. But hired hands are hard to come by, these days; too many young people seeking their futures in cities rather than spend a lifetime in the ruts dug by their fathers and grandfathers. Alex can relate: he’s almost doing the same thing in reverse.

It also doesn’t seem fair to employ any more people and then have to turf them out when he goes back to Sussex. Which he’s going to do. Any week now.

Alex thinks guiltily of the letter folded inside the Book of the Farm on the kitchen table. His aunt’s looping, curling lettering belies the pointed, sharpened words within, inquiring with cutting politeness exactly how much longer he intends to keep up this nonsense. He’d written a few lines after employing Ruth to explain that he intended to stay a little longer and received in return two letters in quick succession to remind him of his obligation to return to his aunt’s house and, preferably, marry an appropriate young lady. He’s currently keeping them hidden from Ruth, lest she say something sensible like _you did promise to go home for November_ and _she’s trying to do what’s best for you, Alex._ He’ll have to write back, of course, and set a date to return, but for now he’s folded his aunt away and is feeling much the better for it.

Light crawls, golden, over the horizon and flows syrupy-slow across the decks of the moored boats and renders the grubby flagstones oddly beautiful. It feels as if the collected world takes in a deep breath before stretching and yawning, and Alex stands very still and listens to the world awake. And then-

On the breeze. A half-hum, and then faint words that he can’t quite make out set to a tune he doesn’t know, and Alex frowns. He’s pushed himself off the wall before the thought has fully run through his head, feet following the sound that’s oddly familiar, but that he just can’t quite pinpoint. He twists and turns down alleyways, the voice getting nearer and then abruptly further away as the walls force Alex away from his goal and he half-wonders if Plymouth is secretly a hotbed of bastardised mythology wherein one is not only doomed by sirens but forced to suffer the indignity of a minotaur’s labyrinth first.

And then, abruptly, Alex turns one last corner and there, edges gilded by the newborn sun, is a man sitting on the floor, legs dangled over the dock’s edge. Now that he’s near enough, Alex recognises the tune as something he’s heard sailors singing as they pull in to the dock; a going-home, work’s-done song. More importantly, he recognises the figure, the voice, the broad shoulders and untidy wayward curls.

“Peter?” he blurts out in astonishment, and the singing breaks off as he turns his head.

“Alright Alex,” Peter says, grinning and offering a small wave. “What are you doing loose in Devon?”

“I could ask the same of you,” Alex manages, grinning despite himself. Seeing Peter again so unexpectedly has somewhat thrown him.

“Yes, but I ran away to sea and you have a controlling aunt in Sussex. Which one of us is more likely to be on a dock in Devon at six o’clock in the morning?” Peter points out rather smugly, and Alex has to laugh. The man’s hardly changed a bit - a little weather- and care-worn, perhaps, but in fundamentals: laugh, grin, easy teasing - and Alex is suddenly transported back to their rooms at university with cracked leather armchairs and precarious stacks of books topped by an abandoned tea cup. “Sit down,” Peter says, patting the sun-warmed stone beside him, “and tell me all about it.”

Alex takes a step forward, and then stops, checking his watch and wincing. “I have to pick up a flock of chickens,” he says apologetically, gesturing over his shoulder.

Peter bursts into laughter, shaking his head. “Of course you do. A flock of chickens.” Alex grins, warmed by Peter’s easy amusement and falling immediately back into the simple, strong friendship he’d missed so much.

The warmth makes it easier. “Come with me,” he says without thinking, and Peter raises an eyebrow at him. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

There’s a pause as Peter looks at him, assessing, and Alex is suddenly worried that he’s going to get Peter back, only to lose him almost immediately. He’s missed him in the years they’ve been apart, and he feels like he’s only just realised quite how much since seeing Peter again and hearing his gently amused teasing.

But then Peter grins at him and swings his legs back onto dry land. “If this story is half as much fun as it sounds your aunt must be having conniptions.”

Alex shrugs helplessly and Peter slings an arm about his shoulders. With the return of that comforting weight and a bright new dawn on the horizon, Aunt Edwina can have as many conniptions as she pleases.

The story of Alex’s life between their last meeting and the present lasts them all the way back to Morwellham, chickens clucking in indignation in their cages. Ruth’s there at the dock to greet them, and Alex suddenly realises that an unexpected guest around a mealtime is actually rather unfair - his aunt’s house was always full of guests, but he’d not stopped to think about the cooks who were forced to deal with that.

She doesn’t seem tremendously cross, though, smiling warmly instead. “Ooh, pretty chickens. I’m ready for a glut of eggs, Alex; I’ve a book of cake recipes I’ve hardly touched.”

“As you command,” Alex grins, and she nods in approval of his obedience. “Ruth, this is Peter Ginn; we were at university together. Peter, this is Mrs Goodman.”

“Ah, the rogue naval man,” Ruth says, shaking Peter’s hand warmly. “Alex says you’ve been adventuring abroad.”

Peter gives Alex a look. “It really isn’t as exciting as all that.”

“Put the chickens away and I’ll see about some breakfast in exchange for a good story or two,” Ruth suggests, by now long accustomed to Alex peaceably following her instructions, and turns to head back up to the farm.

Alex rolls his eyes fondly at her back, hefting his chicken cage to bewildered croaking. Peter, when Alex looks up to tilt his head after Ruth in invitation, is looking at him oddly - a mix of bemusement and long-postponed friendliness, but perhaps something else, too, that Alex cannot quite put his finger on. He raises an eyebrow and Peter shakes his head, huffing a laugh. “Rogue naval man, indeed,” he mutters goodnaturedly, and sets out up the hill.

* * *

“So you can climb a pyramid near Cairo, but a hay rick is beyond you?”

“Oi,” Peter says, kneeling rather precariously on the stack of hay, and Alex grins. He has to squint up against the bright sky, looking up under his palm at Peter in the last throes of summer. “And if you’ll recall, Mr Langlands, I was forced off the pyramid due to perilous circumstances.”

Alex nods, attempting to appear contrite. “My apologies, Mr Ginn. Though I fear you must concede that armed Egyptian nationalists are slightly more threatening than a wobbly haystack.”

“Those, Alex, are the words of a man with his feet firmly upon the ground.” Peter shuffles a bit more, eventually ending up sitting atop the rick rather like a large gnome. “Alright, then; we’re ready to thatch,” he says, stalwartly ignoring Alex’s giggles.

Alex lobs him the thatched sheet of straw they’d obtained with the help of some charitable neighbours, grateful for the extra pair of hands. How he’d have managed half the jobs he’s done this past month without Peter’s help he really couldn’t say; more than that, Ruth’s had the chance to do the odd jobs she’s not had the time or energy to manage whilst running about after Alex, like mend the curtains or ferret out and block the draft in the kitchen. She looks that little bit less worn, these days, and Alex feels just rotten about how much work he’s accidentally forced upon her. He feels a little bad about how much work he’s making Peter do, too; he’d agreed, after all, to stay while he finds his next job onboard and help out in return for food and board, but Alex is growing concerned that fairly Ritz-like accomodation ought to be provided in order to make the exchange fair. Peter is adamant, of course, that he wants for nothing and that sleeping on solid ground and being fed on Ruth’s cooking is vastly superior to anything that some paltry London restaurant could procure, but Alex still worries, even though Peter hasn’t gone to look for shipwork for almost two weeks now.

“Alex, letter for you,” Ruth calls, striding across the yard. Peter raises his head to smile at her, but Alex is already frowning about the letter and its mystery contents. “And,” she says, pressing the paper into his hands, “there’s luncheon on the table, if you’ve the time to spare.”

“Thanks awfully, Mrs Goodman,” Peter says politely, immediately giving up on his task to scramble back down the rick.

Ruth gives him a fondly exasperated look. “Really, Ruth is fine.” Alex hides his smile behind the letter as Peter ducks his head, mumbling something about manners or some other such nonsense. It almost hadn’t occurred to him to be worried about how well Ruth and Peter would get on until it was fairly obviously apparent that they did; even this little disagreement is just misplaced chivalry and charm, and either or both of them could put their foot down on the matter and decide it, if only-

His aunt’s looping letters stare back at him, stark and irritable against the white page. Ruth and Peter’s continued conversation deadens oddly, as if a door between them had been suddenly closed, and a ball of ice settles in his belly. _You are expected,_ the letter reads. _Tenth of November,_ his aunt says. _A dinner._ The whistle sounds, the finger is crooked, and Alex goes crawling back, tail between his legs. He’s surprised it’s taken so long as it has, honestly.

“-ex? Alex,” Peter’s voice sounds oddly distant, until Alex looks up to see them both looking worriedly at him. Peter looks half-inclined to reach out and prod him to make sure he’s still awake and Ruth’s frowning like she did when she’d thought he was coming down with something.

To ward off another well-meant remedy made from nasturtiums and vinegar, Alex offers a weak smile and folds the letter neatly, tucking it into a pocket. “Sorry, rather dropped off there. Lunch, then?”

“Lunch,” Ruth agrees, not entirely convinced. She seems happy to let it go for now, though, for which Alex is grateful. Peter, too, continues to look oddly at him, but he knows better than to pry and Alex thinks he might just have got away without interrogation.

Until he’s halfway through his soup, when he comes to a realisation. His return to Sussex, however dreaded, will have as much, if not more impact upon Ruth and Peter than it will upon Alex himself - to refuse to tell them is beyond selfish, and quite possibly downright unwise. Peter will need to find another job, or Alex will have to start paying him properly - but only if Ruth is happy to have him in the house with her alone - and the farm will have to be maintained without him, and his aunt will say he ought to find a buyer, anyhow, and-

He’s stopped again, and his soup is getting cold. So instead of doing all of that, right now, in his head, he takes the letter out of his pocket and drops it in the middle of the table. Peter and Ruth stop their light conversation, carried on over and around Alex, and turn to him; he should have known better than to think they wouldn’t ask questions. Ruth raises an eyebrow, and Alex sighs.

“My aunt has written to me,” he says. He keeps his eyes on the parchment of the hour, but he can hear Peter shift slightly in his chair. He had never cared for Alex’s aunt, and years do not seem to have softened his views at all. “She expects my return by the tenth - there’s a dinner I’m to attend, you see, and she wants me to meet - some people.”

“Right,” Ruth says, and her tone sounds oddly - contained, as if there’s meaning in that word which she is attempting not to express. “Well, that’s not awfully far from now.”

“No,” Alex says, trying not to sound too miserable.

“You’ll have to go on Thursday, I suppose, if you’re to make it back with plenty of time,” she continues, buttering a slice of bread with rather more savagery than Alex is used to but with a perfectly level tone of voice.

“Yes,” Alex almost whispers, as if just a letter from his aunt has returned him to his usual cowed silence. How desperately he wishes one of them would say something, anything, that would let him stay here a little longer. Anything that could hold him away from his aunt in his tiny scrappy Eden.

“Well, if Peter will stay then I suppose the farm could be managed, though I’ll be working twice as hard again,” Ruth says. Her careful blankness sounds almost like anger, now, but Alex couldn’t possibly explain to his aunt that he has to stay to make the staff’s life easier. But if Peter cannot stay, then - perhaps - _Peter, say something,_ Alex silently begs.

“Of course I’ll stay,” Peter says, and Alex closes his eyes momentarily, flinching as his last hope dies. “Though we should try to finish the rick, then, before you head on home.”

Alex nods and fills his mouth with soup to avoid saying anything more. After all, there’s nothing more to be said.

* * *

Smoke like lost souls swirl around Alex’s carriage as he slips away on All Saint’s Eve. Ruth and Peter walked him to the station, but he couldn’t bear to lean out, to say goodbye. He has instead ensconced himself on the far side of the train, where the ghostly fog is thickest. All Saint’s, Ruth says, is a time between worlds, when the veil is thin and a crossing is possible. When the world loses its shape, briefly, to baffle travellers and loose the wailing spectres of the past. A night to be at home.

Alex looks at the thick, billowing steam and tries to convince himself that crossings go two ways, that the people of his past cannot hurt him, and that he will be _at home_ tonight, with his aunt.

None of it rings quite true.

* * *

_10th November, 1910_

_Morwellham_

_ALEX,_

_Mrs Goodman insists upon checking you reached Sussex in good time, even though you were with us only last week. I tried to reassure her that very few people go missing on trains along the south coast, but she would have none of it. Well, think of us as you sup on wine and fowl; we’ll be clearing the mess made by said fowl and probably eating potatoes. Mrs Goodman wants an account of the best dresses - she’s convinced that the latest London fashions make it impossible to walk, and wishes dearly to be proven correct._

_The lame cow looks a little better today. She has energy enough to try to kick me, so I’ve faith in her recovery. Mrs Goodman has some cheese on the go, but we’re already pressed for time and this might be all we get. Your chickens started laying exactly one day too late for you to have any eggs - we boiled one in your honour. Perhaps it is your presence that delayed them so long._

_I shall write you when there are more developments. Have you spoken to an estate agent yet?_

_Yours, etc.,_

_Peter_

* * *

_12th November, 1910_

_Netherfield, Sussex_

_PETER AND RUTH,_

_Your letter was a pleasant surprise on what is a sadly dreary morning. I reached my aunt’s home in more than enough time and she’s had me playing gooseberry to her countless bridge games ever since. I haven’t the skill and have therefore been relegated to the role of surplus fifth on a permanent basis. I’m afraid I’ve similar ability to describe fashions to you, Ruth; walking appears to be possible, though I cannot honestly fathom how anyone can even breathe in such contraptions as corsets. One certainly couldn’t do any sort of work. Miss Bexleigh tells me they aren’t so terribly bad, once one has become accustomed to them._

_I’m glad to hear such things of the cow and chickens, but I’m sorry to leave you so short-handed. You might speak to Mr Mudge about conjuring up some help - I’ll foot the bill. A boiled egg sounds glorious; I fear my stomach has gone off the rich fare my aunt is providing, and I can hardly think about going outdoors without some indoors occupation being found for me._

_Despairing of seeing the sun again. Yours, etc.,_

_Alex_

* * *

_15th November_

_Morwellham_

_ALEX,_

_You didn’t really discuss undergarments with a nice young lady, did you? Honestly, one despairs. Who is this Miss Bexleigh, anyhow? A new acquaintance, perhaps? None of this excuses the discussion of corsets with an unmarried lady, Alex, though the expression of your aunt if she found out entertained Peter and I for quite some time. Bridge is a ridiculous game - get them all betting their inheritances on whist until you are forcibly removed from the house. Peter tells me whist simply is not played in nice houses; I think the fresh air will do you good._

_The cow succeeded at last in kicking Peter, and has therefore been branded healthy and thrown out with the others. Peter’s whole leg has gone gloriously purple and he’s sulking something awful. Mr Mudge can spare one of his sons for an afternoon a week, but this is only really of any use once Peter’s given up limping. We are, however, practically swimming in eggs with which to pay Mudge the Younger; he’s a proclivity for pickled eggs, and will accept them in lieu of shillings and sixpence._

_Peter thinks some pigs could be usefully put in near the privy without much more work required, but he needs to know if you’ve spoken with an estate agent and are likely to sell soon. Mr Westford says he’s not heard from you either._

_Let us know, would you? Yours, etc.,_

_Ruth_

* * *

_17th November_

_Netherfield_

_PETER AND RUTH,_

_I talk to you about corsets, and you’re not married. Elsie seemed not to mind terribly much, either. We’ve managed to escape the house now by taking constitutionals around the grounds, but I’ve lifted nothing heavier than this pen for weeks and I half fancy my arms are about to become entirely useless. I feel like I’ve been half asleep since coming here - waking at eight feels as if I’ve spent the better part of the day in bed, and I’ve simply nothing to do. I find myself staring out of the window more often than not feeling utterly useless - my apologies. This is hardly important; you’ve no desire, I’m sure, to hear my whining when you two are both so busy._

_I’m terribly sorry about your leg, Peter, even though I am pleased to hear the herd is back to its full complement. I’m sure Ruth has some kind of balm that she’s desperate to try on someone; she’ll have you walking in no time, even if only to avoid repeat treatment. I don’t suppose hands could be brought in from further afield? Perhaps Mr Westford knows of other lost souls in desperate need of employment and pickled eggs - Ruth, after all, has turned out to be an excellent investment._

_Pigs sound excellent. Install as many as you like, as long as that amount is manageable and not horrendously expensive._

_Yours, etc.,_

_Alex_

* * *

_19th November_

_Morwellham_

_ALEX,_

_Ruth claims that, on the matter of corsets, she does not count. Elsie, is it now? Getting on well, are we? Ruth says I’m to stop gossiping, because it doesn’t suit me. We don’t mind your rambling, Alex - are you quite well? Truthfully, you sound desperately unhappy. Are we fretting for nothing? Can you not escape in the dead of night to weed the ornamental rose garden, or something?_

_The leg is fine, really. It’s gone a fascinating shade of green, which Ruth says is disgusting, but I’ve given up on limping and am well on the mend without too much medical experimentation. We are, therefore, getting much more done, though Mr Westford says he will keep his ear to the ground. He also says he’s written to you, but received no response; would you drop him a line or two when you’ve a minute?_

_Two pigs will be in situ by St Andrew’s at the latest, according to the gentleman in Calstock. I nodded authoritatively at the time, but fear not - Ruth knows her saint’s days, and has therefore adequately prepared me for their arrival before the 30th. Alex, really; have you seen an estate agent at all? Ruth and I_ _have_ _to know if you’re about to sell up under our feet. If you aren’t likely to, then we’ll need to prepare for that, too. Please write and tell us something._

_Yours, etc.,_

_Peter_

* * *

_25th November_

_Morwellham_

_ALEX,_

_It’s possible our last letter got lost in the post somewhere, or arrived late. But we’ve not heard anything of you for almost a week now and Mr Westford cannot raise you either. Sorry if Peter was a little snippy with you, but he is right. We shan’t take it personally if you are selling - we knew you would - but we should like to know about it before we are dispossessed._

_Sorry; that was snippy, too._

_We’re worried about you, Alex. Write us back, please._

_With affection and concern, we remain_

_Yours, etc.,_

_Ruth and Peter_

* * *

_6th December_

_Morwellham_

_ALEX,_

_Fairly sure you’re ignoring us now. I know you have your life in Sussex to manage, but you could at least spare three minutes to pen a letter letting us know. Is it this Elsie Bexleigh? I understand you’ve taken a shine to this girl, but really, Alex, this is treating us very ill. At least as our employer, you owe us an explanation, but I thought you were our frien_

“PETER,” Ruth yells over one shoulder, eyes fixed on the figure approaching up the road to the farm. There’s an air of suspicion in her squint, as if she knows already that this is no ordinary visitor and simply requires Peter to help her decide whether or not he is a welcome one.

Peter appears behind her at fairly record speed, frowning with some concern; Ruth is not much inclined to shout under ordinary circumstances. He spots the oncoming figure not long after and turns his frown upon him, until-

“Alex?” he says hesitantly, and the squint clears instantly from Ruth’s face.

“Oh, Lord, it is,” she says, hitching up her skirt and striding down the road.

It’s hard to read in her expression and tone what, exactly, she intends to do when she reaches him. Alex is half minded to turn tail and flee just in case, but he isn’t quite sure what he thinks he deserves, yet, and besides. He’s come an awfully long way to not see them.

Ruth bears down on him, Peter jogging after - by his expression, quite possibly in order to rescue him from the worst of Ruth’s wrath. “Alex Langlands,” she says, voice trembling with the strain of containing her feelings into two innocuous words. Alex stays still, and prepares to take the punishment he deserves.

It is, therefore, something of a world-tilting surprise when she steps up onto her tiptoes and wraps her strong arms around his shoulders in the tightest embrace Alex can remember ever having. Peter, over her shoulder, looks as surprised as he does. Alex makes an effort and manages to bring his arms up to hug her in return, rather more gently.

“Honestly, Alex, I half thought you’d died,” she says crossly, clinging to his shoulders without any sign that she might at some point let go. “You simply - fell off the face of the earth for more than a fortnight! Don’t ever do it again.”

“I won’t,” Alex mumbles through a throat that is suddenly and rather suspiciously tight. “I won’t, I promise.”

“Good,” Ruth pronounces, finally letting him go and nodding firmly at him. She sniffs. “I’m still quite cross with you, mind,” she adds, pointing at him accusingly.

Alex flushes. “Yes, I rather deserve that.”

“Well,” Ruth says. “I’ll - put a kettle on.”

There is a long pause, in which everyone tries to remember what to do with themselves. Peter ducks his head, but cannot hide his grin before it spreads to Alex, and then Ruth. “It is good to see you again,” Peter says, and Alex holds those little genuine words tightly to his heart.

The farmhouse is not much changed in the time he’s been away; Ruth has, of course, kept it immaculately clean despite having a list of jobs as long as her arm, but she still hasn’t finished the rag rug she’d started not long before he left. One of Peter’s waistcoats, torn, is draped over the back of a chair; there is a stack of letters on the table and an unfinished one beside them; dinner is bubbling on the stove. He could have stepped out for just an afternoon, not little over a month.

Alex leaves his cases by the door and assumes his usual seat at the table while Ruth and Peter dance carefully around each other finding the tea set with ease. He spares a moment’s smile for the practised movements, before his eye falls upon the letters and, despite his best attempts, stays there. The stack is all his own work, neatly kept within reach in the heart of the house, and the unfinished paper beside him is-

“Oh,” Peter says, and the dance stills. The ticking of the clock on the mantle is almost unnaturally loud in the sudden stillness, but Alex can’t take his eyes off the letter held limply between his fingers. “I didn’t mean - I don’t-” Peter cuts himself off with a hum of irritation.

“No,” Alex says softly. “No, you’re right. I did treat you very ill, and I’m sorry for it. I didn’t - I wasn’t thinking straight; it’s almost impossible in that house. I’m so sorry. I should have written, but I was too - cowardly. I couldn’t - I couldn’t bear to say what my aunt wanted me to, so I didn’t say anything at all. I’ve been perfectly horrid to you both and I am _so sorry._ ”

Peter snatches the paper from Alex’s grip before he can react, scrunching it in his hands and lobbing it into the stove. “No such need,” he says. “I know your aunt’s an awful old cow-”

“Peter,” Ruth chides mildly.

“-so we’ll forgive you your actions as influenced by said awful old cow.”

Ruth gives Peter a disapproving look, but Alex manages a smile. “No, he’s right: she really is awful. I had to escape out of a window just to get here.”

Ruth puts down her teapot. “You did not.” He offers her a sheepish grin, and she laughs. It washes over him, warm and golden, and he can’t help smiling properly. He’s missed that noise more than he had realised. “Honestly, you boys.”

The tea is poured and they sit for a moment in peaceful silence.

“It’s hard, in her house, to remember that other people exist.” Ruth and Peter give him curious looks. Alex is rather surprised himself that he’s saying it, but it’s true. “She - my aunt - doesn’t think, often, about anyone else except to make them do what she wants. And it became difficult to remember that I owe you things, and that my actions might hurt you, and I’m so sorry for that. There’s no excuse for it. My aunt insisted that I sell the farm and remain in Sussex, but I couldn’t do it. I thought that, perhaps, if I didn’t mention my decision over the sale I wouldn’t have to make it, and I did not think of how that would hurt you, and I am truly sorry.”

Alex can’t peel his eyes off his tea, hands loosely fisted upon the table beside it. In consequence, he startles rather a lot when two other hands wrap around his fingers; firm and small on his right, broad and calloused on his left. “Thank you,” Ruth says gently.

“And you’re forgiven,” Peter adds, squeezing his fingers. Alex squeezes back, grateful.

“Does that mean you’re staying, then?” Ruth says.

Alex’s breath catches. He wants to - Lord above, does he want to - but he will be exceptionally lucky if Ruth and Peter deign to have him back after the treatment he’s given them. He’s nowhere else to go, however; to return to his aunt is entirely unthinkable, not least because of his daring midnight flight. “If you would find it - amenable-”

Peter and Ruth sigh hugely in relief. “Thank heaven,” Ruth says emphatically.

“It’s your farm, you daft sod,” Peter says, grinning.

“It’s been a nightmare, dear, to run this farm without you,” Ruth says, and Alex grips their fingers tightly, beaming, and doing his best to laugh rather than cry in sheer relief.

* * *

Andrew snuffles at his hand expectantly, waiting for him to sling his bucket over the wall and into the trough. “Merry Christmas to you, too,” Alex says as the pig snorts in delight and makes her way over to the double serving. Peter had insisted that his pregnant sow be named after what he refers to as “her” saint’s day - hence, Andrew the sow. Alex had made a great show of finding this entirely ridiculous, but it makes him smile fondly every time.

Ruth smiles at him as she returns from the chickens and he offers her a tiny wave in response. It’s so much vastly better than being back with his aunt, even though the air is below freezing now and it’s barely even light outside: here, he smiles at pigs and breathes in great lungfuls of fresh air and is greeted every morning by people who are really, genuinely pleased to see him. He’s received a handful of angry letters from her, which are immediately forwarded to Mr Westford to deal with, in case she’s of a mind to do anything that might actually require his attention - Alex himself has not had to deal with her personally since his return to Devon, and he’s found it remarkably freeing.

Christmas is a quiet affair, and Alex likes it better than he has any Christmas for a long time. There are no great artificial decorations, there is no huge, opulent meal, and he receives two presents: a scarf and a book about chickens. They’re the best presents he’s had in a while, too. The church is colder and the Methodist service unfamiliar to his High Anglican ears, but he’s not trapped in his aunt’s family box, crammed in instead on the end of the Williams family pew, and if he looks around just a little he can see Ruth with the Westfords and Peter squashed between two Mudge boys.

The afternoon sees them betting chores and walnuts on hands and hands of whist and rummy, and going hoarse playing pit and howling with laughter. Ruth produces sloe gin to aid in the recovery of their voices and Alex is quite happily drowsily drunk all evening.

Peter steps out to shut the chickens in, swaying slightly on his feet, and Ruth extends her foot to gently kick Alex’s ankle where they are both stretched out in chairs in front of the stove. “Can I help you?” he says, aiming for imperious and ending up a little wobbly.

Ruth scrunches her face up, giggling adorably, and Alex relaxes into a grin. She kicks his ankle again. “It’s nice to have you here,” she says, head tipping to one side and making her smile terribly lopsided.

“It is good to be home,” Alex replies and yawns expansively. “Nice to be here. With you two.”

Ruth hums her agreement, tugging her new shawl around her shoulders and tapping her toes against the sole of his foot. The fire crackles in the stove, wind whistling around the house, and Alex closes his eyes to better enjoy the peace and quiet.

Ruth’s laughter makes him crack them open again, and some time must have passed because now Peter is standing over her with a small sprig of greenery in his hand and mischief in his eye. “You are just - dreadful,” Ruth manages around giggles, but this is opportunity enough - Peter swoops in and presses a kiss to her cheek, carefully dangling the mistletoe above their heads.

Alex grins at the nonsense before him as Ruth squeaks in surprise before dissolving into further laughter. Peter, beaming, presses another quick kiss to her hair in a gesture that looks like it could almost be familiar to him, before turning to Alex. There’s a look in his eye that Alex recognises: a cat about to pounce has the same glint, or a Peter in their second year of university about to whale upon him with a new feather pillow.

“No,” Alex says preemptively, stumbling to his feet and holding his arms out to keep Peter a distance from him. Alas, Peter has had the benefit of a little fresh air to give him the slightest sober edge and the resulting chase is extremely short. Peter catches him up in a bear hug, feet lifted ever so slightly off the floor so that Alex is powerless to do aught but offer giggling pleas for mercy. Ruth, unsympathetically, is howling with laughter. Peter’s lips against his cheek are soft, slightly chapped, and accompanied by the odd tickle of stubble; it’s all entirely alien to him, but not exactly unwelcome. Alex is too busy giggling and putting up the slightest token resistance to worry about it, especially since Peter lets him go, beaming, almost as soon as it’s begun.

“There,” Peter says, sounding satisfied and with one arm still slung around Alex’s waist. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” Alex echoes with a grin, fighting loose to return to his chair and the warmth of the fire.

“Merry Christmas, dear hearts,” Ruth says fondly, smiling softly up at Peter and knocking her ankle against Alex’s foot.

It’s only in the cold light of Boxing Day morn that Alex comes to the sudden and terrible conclusion that, somewhere between Peter saying _Ruth_ rather than _Mrs Goodman_ and the fond, familiar kisses of the night before, Peter and Ruth have grown _fond_ of each other. Andrew snuffles crossly, her food unacceptably delayed, and Alex struggles to breathe against the realisation that hits him like a hammer to the centre of his ribcage for reasons he cannot quite understand: Ruth and Peter like each other, and this hurts Alex like nothing else can.


	2. Epiphany

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But I never went to heaven.  
> There was right good reason why,  
> For they sent a shining angel to me there,  
> An angel, down in Devon,  
> (Clad in muslin by the bye)  
> With the halo of the sunshine on her hair.
> 
> \- Alfred Noyes

They’re about a week into 1911 when Peter becomes certain that there is something bothering Alex, and that he has no intention of telling Peter or Ruth what said something is. Since Christmas, by Peter’s reckoning, Alex has retreated somewhat into himself and he no longer leaps at the chance to spend time in Peter and Ruth’s company as he had before. He doesn’t launch himself out of his chair to walk Ruth to the shops, he doesn’t walk by the horses’ noses to better debate with Peter as he leads them back to the stables, and - worst - he doesn’t seem to entirely appreciate Peter deliberately bringing Alex into their company. Of course, it is wholly possible - and, in fact, probable - that Alex is merely returning to his modes of behaviour prior to his unwilling departure from Devon, having spent December glued to their sides for fear that he might have to leave again. Peter has almost certainly rose-tinted those halcyon days of October, when the weather was warmer and he had two friends both old and new with whom to spend his waking moments, during his miserable separation from Alex. So perhaps Alex, now, is merely resuming normal, socially-acceptable friendliness - only Peter’s half forgotten how to reciprocate.

It wasn’t ever like this at university, of course; not after the first couple of weeks, when they had both given up on being shy. They were younger, more academic, far more foolish; there hadn’t been space for a rigid social structure in the four rooms they’d had between them, so they’d not bothered. Once you’ve seen a man wrapped in nought but a towel, howling in frustration at the dodgy taps, there really isn’t much point in insisting on perfectly buttoned shirtcuffs and refusing to discuss ‘improper’ subjects. They had, for this reason, become fast friends in very little time and found it much easier to spend their leisure hours in the relaxed atmosphere of their flat rather than out with the other chaps, many of whom had ideas about the dignity that should be afforded them.

Perhaps it is this, more than anything else, that is rubbing Peter the wrong way. He would have much preferred Alex to reveal that he intended to grow up and become exactly like every other establishment gent when they were young and silly, so that Peter would not have spent the remainder of his adult life under the false impression that someone else out there felt and thought as he did.

But, Peter has to admit as Alex directs a rather concerned frown his way and he remembers he’s supposed to be _clearing_ the ditch, not frowning at it, that isn’t actually fair. If Alex really truly wanted to become - well, exactly what his aunt wants of him - then he could have stayed quite happily for the rest of his life in Sussex, taking _constitutionals_ and getting no closer to the earth than trailing his long fingers over the waxy softness of a rose petal in an ornamental garden. As Alex is, presently, coated in mud past his knees and using his careful fingers to assess the health of the strawberry plants whose profits are to keep them in bread and jam til the oats are harvested, it seems rather inaccurate to lump him in with their old classmates. But - and there’s always a but, these days - something is still clearly bothering the man.

“Ruth and I thought we might all go down the pub this evening,” Peter says. As an opening salvo, he thinks it innocuous enough, but Alex’s face twists ever so briefly into something almost pained, almost angry, before returning to a careful neutrality. The moment passes so quickly that Peter might think he’d imagined it, but there’s a hurt in his chest that feels all too real to put aside. “Fancy it?” he manages, attempting to inject some levity into his tone.

He knows before Alex has even opened his mouth what answer he is to receive. “I really ought to get some dubbin on these boots, and I want to read up on what Mr Stephens says about these strawberries. You go, though; take Ruth.”

Peter attempts bracing enthusiasm. “You’re alright - we’ll all go another day.”

Alex waves a hand at him. “Really, it’s fine. Take the night off. I’m sure Ruth would like the break and I’ll manage my own dinner. I might like the peace and quiet, anyway.” He says it with a grin, though one that’s dimmer than his usual, and Peter clearly isn’t supposed to take it personally.

He does anyway, and Ruth can tell. She conveys her concern by kicking him in the shins under the table and entirely ignoring his startled yelp, raising an eyebrow at him. It’s a move she perfected over the course of Alex’s absence; Peter refers to it as the _I won’t ask again_ , even though she’s not yet actually asked him anything at all.

He huffs and looks away, pushing his beer mug in idle circles on the table. “It’s Alex,” he says, as if that should be news to her. “I’m beginning to wonder - well, it’s nothing.”

“It is most certainly not _nothing_ ,” Ruth says tartly, fixing him with an unimpressed look. Peter responds with a faintly pleading one in return and she sighs. “I think he’s behaving oddly too - there, will that start you off?”

“Have we done something to upset him?” Peter blurts out, worrying the mug’s handle between his fingers. “He doesn’t seem to want to be with us.”

Ruth taps her nails on the pub’s faintly sticky table, lips pinching as she thinks. “No,” she says after a moment. “No, I don’t think so. He was fine before Christmas, and I can’t think what would have upset him after that.”

Peter listens rather morosely to the other customers carousing. He doesn’t exactly miss the drinking and shouting that came with an evening in the pub with his shipmates, since under usual circumstances he’d have a great deal more fun just talking with Alex and Ruth - and would come out of the experience with a wallet more inclined to jingle and a head less inclined to pound - but tonight he does rather miss the loud merriment and potential to drown one’s sorrows in exceptionally cheap and dreadful drink. He’s not under the impression that Ruth, with her half-pint of cider still mostly full, would much appreciate watching him become paralytic or attempting to carry him home afterwards. He sips his beer slowly and rather sullenly.

“Perhaps he’s heard from his aunt again,” Ruth suggests.

Peter pulls a face. “You know her letters go straight to Mr Westford. And he talks to us, now, when he thinks something might change on the farm.”

Ruth nods thoughtfully. She looks rather down, and Peter is suddenly very sorry for bringing the whole miserable business up at all. It wasn’t at all his intention to upset her; he should have just tried to give her a pleasant night off.

“Maybe he’s still hungover from all your sloe gin,” he says, mustering up a grin.

Ruth huffs a laugh. “No, Peter; you were the one who suffered most from that. Rather fitting, it must be said, what with St Stephen being the patron saint of headaches, and all. Though I think his headache was from being stoned to death, not the demon drink.”

“I wished you’d stoned me to death,” Peter grouses to make her laugh, trying to hide a grin as her bright amusement rings clear in their corner of the pub.

Ruth draws herself up straight, summoning a disapproving glare to fix upon him with eyes dancing in amusement. “Lips that touch liquor shall not touch mine,” she intones solemnly, before sipping her cider and grinning at him over the rim. He laughs and ducks his head, dragging a finger through a tacky ring of condensation on the table. “Ooh,” Ruth says as an idea occurs to her. “Perhaps Alex has gone teetotal and is upset because your lips, having touched sloe gin, then proceeded to touch his cheek.”

They are seated quite a way from the bar and the other patrons, who are paying them not the slightest bit of mind, and Ruth has the good sense to keep her voice low and conspiratorial, but Peter can’t help his gaze darting nervously around the room. “Yes, perhaps,” he says with a smile, equally quiet, when it becomes apparent that no-one in the pub has heard them. Ruth grins back, her idea clearly not serious, but.

The idea eats at Peter, even as their conversation moves onto safer ground. He’d not seemed to mind at the time, but _at the time_ they had all been rather comfortably drunk, and Peter has survived enough university escapades to know full-well that drunken Alex makes decisions that sober Alex often has cause to regret. He knows, too, that kissing one’s unmarried lady friend at Christmas is rather improper but ultimately forgivable; kissing one’s male friend, married or not, is downright illegal. Alex has never been a natural at precise social niceties, but he’s never been an amoral criminal, either. The thought puts Peter on edge - he can hardly imagine what it’s doing to Alex.

He’s aware that Ruth is picking up on his preoccupation, but he waits until they’re arm-in-arm and wandering through the frosty pitch-black night before bringing it up. He’s only discussing the matter at all because there’s no way Ruth will let him back into the house before having it out of him, and at midnight in early January one is not much inclined to linger out of doors.

“Do you think _I’ve_ upset him?” Peter says, worrying a loose thread on his glove between his fingers.

“No,” Ruth says confidently, tapping his hands to stop the nervous motion. “And don’t go creating more darning for me to do. I said, remember, that we’d not done anything to upset Alex. Why do you suppose you have?”

“Well-” Peter breaks off. It’s - difficult. To say it out loud. As if, if left unacknowledged, the whole incident might never have happened. “At Christmas. What you said about the - lips touching.” He can feel his face burning up, thankful for the cover of night that keeps his embarrassment well-concealed.

There is a pause. “Oh,” Ruth says, as if the thought had not occurred to her, and Peter squirms in shame. He’s quite ready for her to remove her hand from the crook of his arm as if burnt - but she does not. Ruth squeezes his arm and, if anything, steps a little closer. “Well, it was Christmas. You were only playing. If he is being daft about it, then that’s very much his own problem.”

Peter’s eyes close of their own accord as he breathes out in relief. Ruth’s good opinion of him matters to him more than any other, save possibly Alex; it is a weight off his shoulders to know that she doesn’t think too terribly ill of him for his ill-advised Christmas nonsense. It’s a relief, too, to know that his actions meant nothing: he had wanted to kiss Ruth and Alex in equal measure because they are his friends and he had wanted to include them in a Christmas game, not because of some latent perversion that would see him off to Reading Gaol. The feeling of warmth that had spread over him, looking at Ruth and Alex dozing before the fire, had merely been sloe gin and friendly affection. How right it had felt to hold them in his arms meant nothing.

His eyes startle open as he trips on a rock, Ruth’s hands tightening on him as he stumbles. “Woah,” she laughs. “Too much beer, Peter?”

He scratches the back of his neck, grinning rather sheepishly. “Sorry.”

Ruth presses closer into his side, smiling and leaning her head on his upper arm. She seems so small, then, all bundled up in layers but so vulnerable without them. She’s got such utter strength of will and character that for her to seem somehow weak is deeply unlikely, but Peter forgets sometimes just how _small_ she appears sometimes. “Forgiven,” she yawns, and Peter has the sudden urge to catch her up in his arms and carry her home, to keep her warm and safe with him and Alex.

But he couldn’t possibly. It would be an abuse of her trust, and Peter couldn’t bear to be someone who frightened her. And he can’t help feeling that their home, right now, is not quite warm enough - not with Alex playing the odd wrong note in their well-practised symphony. So he doesn’t pick her up and hold her close; he lets her lean into his side, eyes drooping, and attempts to convey his affection from a safe distance.

* * *

Candlemas brings no change to Alex’s mood, but an abrupt switch to the weather; the second of February dawns sunny and bright and unseasonably pleasant, and sees Peter standing out in the yard in his shirtsleeves, head tipped back to the sun.

“It’s not that warm,” Ruth says in amusement from the doorway. She’s leaning against the door jamb, arms folded and half an eye on her stove - Peter’s eyes are closed against the blinding light, but he knows her well enough by now.

He shrugs, smiling. “It’s been colder.” It really has; the sun has only now burnt off the last of the heavy snowfall and melted Ruth’s snow lady, which had lasted almost three weeks in the bitter January cold.

“If you catch a chill I shall be tremendously unsympathetic,” Ruth warns. It’s an idle threat and they all know it; Alex, in truth, is more of a fretter than Ruth, but only because Ruth has a far better idea of what to do with illness and therefore doesn’t fuss so much, simply providing sensible remedies that work well. But Peter remembers his badly-bruised leg, and how he’d tried not to limp and wince too much until Ruth had sat him down with balms and kindness and stroked a hand fondly through his hair as he tried not to cry for the pain.

“I’ll be fine,” he says. “The weather's lovely.”

“If Candlemas be dry and fair,” Alex recites, “the half o’ winter’s to come and mair.” He’s mirroring Ruth on Peter’s other side, leaning against the fence post, but when Peter cracks his eye open he can see him turning his face into the light, too, like a flower long dulled by winter. Sun-lit Alex, after being so long washed-out by snow-greyed skies, is rather astonishing; glowing and gilded about the edges, warmed from within.

Peter has to close his eyes again to stop himself staring. “Right pessimist, you are,” he says, and Alex laughs. It’s good to hear him laugh properly; such moments are few and far between, these days, and Peter clings to them tightly. “It’s a lovely day, Candlemas or no Candlemas.”

“Go and enjoy it, then, before you distract me and my saucepans runneth over,” Ruth says, and Peter opens his eyes to see her smiling fondly at them both. She can’t stand the quiet, joyless evenings either, and seeing Alex happy is far better than the pair of them escaping guiltily to the pub for an evening not much more enjoyable than they might have had at home.

Peter offers her a lazy salute before wheeling about to face Alex, Ruth’s laughter behind him. “What joys await today, sir?” he says, feigning propriety.

“Well,” Alex says, pretending to think. “The barns need clearing, and there are tools to be sharpened, and-” He gives up on rattling through their list of indoors-jobs in favour of giggling at Peter’s intensifying frown. Alex is getting much better at teasing, and Peter almost regrets teaching him. “Check on the animals, mend the field boundaries?” he suggests instead, and Peter offers him a begrudgingly amused grin.

With the sun beating down and Alex at his shoulder, whistling on the chilly wind, Peter can’t help but feel as though, maybe, they’ve started again; back to the old, cheery Alex and a bit of pleasant weather, and now they’ll all get on properly again. Peter’s chest swells with hope - a return to friendly normality, so that he no longer spends too long watching the sunlight in Alex’s hair, or noting the exact curve of his smile, simply because he’s missed him.

That’s why.

* * *

The feeling lasts for a glorious seven hours - and then the cart wheel gives an unholy crack, and Alex and Peter stare at each other for half a second with wild, wide eyes before remembering to stop the horse and unload their heavy equipment before the whole thing gives out. Prince stamps his hooves, bored, as they nervously prod and examine the long split in one of the spokes. The cart won’t take much more weight than Peter’s own, now, not without groaning worryingly, and they can’t possibly use it.

“It’ll probably make it to the cartwright,” Peter explains to Ruth quietly over the dishes. “But it’s rather put a hole in our plans to do - well, almost anything, really.”

Ruth purses her lips, looking worriedly at Alex as she absently dries a plate. All his earlier cheer is gone, but there’s good reason now; head braced in his hands, he’s poring over Ruth’s meticulous account book and searching for a way to stretch their money into shelling out for a new wheel without stealing from future months’ budgets. “I suppose I could trim the food budget a little,” she offers.

Alex shakes his head, not looking up. “I don’t see how. We’re already eating on a tight budget as it is.”

“And you boys need the food to keep you going, I know,” Ruth says. “Well, I’ll just go a little hungry; that’s alright.”

“You will not,” Peter and Alex snap firmly in unison. Ruth looks rather surprised, and Peter turns back to his washing up, feeling the tips of his ears heat in slight embarrassment. Only slight: it’s rather comforting to find that Alex has similar ideas about taking care of Ruth.

Alex sighs. “We’ll have to have it mended,” he murmurs, more to himself than anyone else. “Hope the harvest is good and we can make the money back.”

Peter dries his hands and rounds the table to lean over Alex’s shoulder as he sits up, hands dropping limply to the table. He looks over the neat rows and columns filled with Ruth’s cursive lettering, all neat little numbers to say that they are living within their means, but that their means cannot presently stretch to an entire new cart wheel. Probably three-quarters of one, but without-

He presses his finger under a row, underlining it with a blunt nail. “Use that, then.”

Alex looks up at him, frowning. They’re closer now than they have been of an evening for a while; Alex’s hair brushes against Peter’s waistcoat and Peter’s arm pulls him down, almost surrounding his friend. He’s reminded suddenly of Christmas, and pressing his lips to Alex’s face, breathing in the smell of cloves and sloes and hay. Their faces are too close for that memory and, in panic, he drags his eyes away to land on Ruth, watching in some confusion from the sink. But that, then, just reminds him of Ruth laughing from her chair, wrapped up in the shawl he and Alex had given her, as he put Alex down. She had been all softness when he’d snuck in to kiss her, clothes and skin and hair, and quite beautiful in the light of the candles and her laughter.

“I won’t take your wages, Peter,” Alex says, and Peter drags his attention back to numbers and business and the future of the farm, not soft light and sugar smells and memories.

“Why not? I’ve not spent much of them. And if the cart can’t be mended and the harvest can’t be taken in, then I’ll be out of a job with no wages anyway.”

“You could get another job. You worked for those - I’m not taking all your wages,” Alex says, adamant.

 _But I want_ this _job,_ Peter thinks. _I want this job, and this farm, and these people, even when you’re being a right misery, Alex. I worked to keep this farm going and to keep us together, not for a few shillings a week._ “I want you to have them.”

“Take half,” Ruth suggests, and Peter looks up, frowning. “And then take half of mine.”

Alex shakes his head. “No, I - I can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” Ruth says calmly, and Peter is rather glad that their resident financier has taken up his cause. “Better yet, don’t pay us at all. Combine the house finances - which will make my life a darn sight easier - and we can all afford beer, and cart wheels, and bread and jam for tea.”

“One purse is how the other farms around here stay afloat,” Peter points out. “It will be better for everyone.”

There is a pause, and Peter starts to hope that maybe, just maybe, Alex will fold. “No,” he says at last, and Peter sighs, pushing back from the table. “You’re my employees, not - not anything else, and you will be paid.”

Peter can hear, over the sudden, dizzying hurt of that phrase, Ruth’s sharp intake of breath. _Not anything else_ \- it echoes in the silence of the house like a gunshot, and Peter just cannot breathe in that abrupt stillness any more. He grabs a coat at random from the pegs beside the door.

“Peter-” Ruth begins, but he will not listen. Not now. There’s an icy stab of terrible pain lodged between his ribs like a knife and he is not going to try yanking it out with an audience.

“I’ll shut the chickens in,” he says, voice sounding oddly dead even to his own ears, and carefully refuses to slam the door behind him.

Over sound of his own boots crunching through the frost he can hear an argument start up behind him and, suddenly, all his rage turns to resignation. Alex doesn’t care for him - so be it. What did he think was likely to happen there, anyway? They had been friends at university, certainly, but Peter had been dropped by many people he once knew at university when they had reached an age at which it was no longer acceptable to know a boy whose father had made his money on a Merseyside shipyard. He had thought Alex would be different. More fool him.

The chickens cluck around his ankles in vague disapprobation and he shivers, shaking himself from his reverie. His disappointment, he cannot help but note as he opens the coop and gently shepherds the ladies inside, persists, though. He had really thought that Alex liked him - that they were friends. Another shiver runs through him and he turns to the clothing he’d grabbed before running. He’s got Ruth’s scarf, which he wraps quickly around his neck; it’s good wool, smelling faintly of marzipan - to which Ruth is rather partial - and it goes a long way toward making him feel better. The coat, however-

The coat is Alex’s. Sturdy and warm, without the long line of replacement stitching that adorns the back of his own rather battered jacket, and Peter shuts the door after the last hen absently, eyes fixed upon the coat. It smells faintly of Alex and winter sunshine and Peter is cold, so cold. He gets one arm in, and it feels almost like an inside-out embrace; as if Alex is holding him close. But the coat, like Alex, is narrower across the shoulders, and if Peter hauls on the embrace he so desperately wishes for then the coat will rip in two and he’ll only have broken remains to show for it.

His legs give out beneath him and he crumples, sitting on the step of the coop and clutching the coat in his fists. Perhaps he and Alex simply don’t fit anymore. Perhaps this one-arm half-hug is as much as Peter can ever have.

But he wants more. He wants to have the whole embrace and more: to have and hold Alex and Ruth both, to kiss them - and not for a game and not just at Christmas, but proper heart-and-soul because he cares for them, deeply - and to have them in his home forever. He wants this to be his family, he wants to wake up beside them, he wants-

He wants things that make him blush, burning against the cold night air, and Peter wakes up from this moment of irrational, unattainable desire. He cannot possibly have what he wants; it is foolish to even dream of such things. Even were it not illegal, immoral, against all rules of society - Alex sees him as an employee, and nothing more. Nothing at all.

He hears footsteps in the frost and looks up. Ruth is wrapped up in Peter’s own coat, looking impossibly small and impossibly sad. He can see tear tracks on her face in the moonlight, smudged and silver, and she steps forwards carefully, her lips twisting against further emotion. Dear Ruth, whom he loves just as much as Alex, but has shown no signs of feeling as Peter does. Dear, beloved Ruth, whom their dear, beloved Alex has hurt without thought; and this is no basis on which to build anything, perhaps, except a proper employer-employee relationship.

Peter reaches out Alex’s coat to her. He no longer wants to hold it tight; he wants it at a distance, from which he is in no danger of ripping it, and in no danger of an embrace. Ruth steps forwards and folds her little fingers around his own, pinning the coat between them so that it is inescapable and if they pulled apart it might break anyhow - but if Ruth pulls back, Peter will let go. He’d rather she have him, than tear him to shreds with desires upon which he can never act. Peter will let them both go.

Ruth steps forwards again, stroking a spare hand over his hair like she had last time he was hurting. Peter’s breath seethes through his teeth, fixed in a grimace of pain and anguish, and his shoulders shudder. Ruth’s dress is cool and soft when she cradles his head against her stomach and her voice is sweet and soft and ever so sad, hushing him gently as he sobs hot, angry tears, hands by turn gripping and releasing Alex’s empty coat and the moss green wool of her skirt.

* * *

Ruth takes the cart to be mended. It’s a bit of a trek to walk all the way to the cartwright, but Ruth’s slight enough for Peter to wrap his hands about her waist and place her gently behind Prince without the cart creaking worryingly, and Prince has always had a soft spot for her; Peter’s fairly sure she bribes him with the judicious application of hay and sugar. But if it means that Prince will listen and obey during Ruth’s solo journey and not drive her into any danger then Peter will begrudge them none of it.

“You can forage for your own lunch, I’m sure,” Ruth says, looking down from her perch at him. He tries not to look too worried about sending her halfway to Latchley in a broken cart on her own, since he has already been informed that such concern is not exactly welcome. She leans down and ruffles his curls, offering him a smile. “I’ll be back for supper. See if you can’t talk to Alex, will you?”

Peter frowns, folding his arms and pulling away slightly from her hand. “I don’t want to,” he mumbles sullenly.

Ruth gives him a distinctly unimpressed look. “Did I ask whether or not you _wanted_ to, Mr Ginn?”

Peter huffs, disproportionately angry, and turns his head away. “Why not _you_ talk to him?”

“I will, when I get ho- back. But he hurt you too, Peter, and you have to talk to him.” Ruth tries to smooth his hair but he steps back, cross and cold.

Peter would rather not talk to Alex about this. He would, in fact, rather remove his own tongue than converse with the man about what had sent him crying out into the cold the night before. And rather than be pressured, he would apparently prefer to damage what little friendship he has left.

“No. I don’t _have_ to, just because you said so. You don’t tell me what to do; you’re just - you’re just a girl, and you don’t know anything, so leave it alone, understand?”

Ruth pulls back from him, sitting up straight. Her face could be carved in marble for how cold and unmoving it looks, and there’s hurt and disappointment and terrible, glacial fury in her eyes. Peter’s fingers coil into fists where they tremble against his thighs, breath coming fast, and hot bitter blood roars in his ears and drowns out the part of him that begs to tell her how much he did not mean any of those words that hang between them like shards of something beautiful, all broken and sharp.

She gathers the reins in her hands and turns her head away, her profile proud and cold in silhouette against the darkening clouds above her. Ruth looks, then, like a classical frieze of a  warrior queen; a twentieth-century Boudicca on a broken cart, betrayed and vengeful and so, so beautiful in her brilliant and awful rage. Prince sets out briskly at her instruction, the cart rattling over the stones and limping on with its broken wheel and taking Ruth away with it. How long will the three of them keep limping onwards, all broken apart inside, before someone gives it all up as a bad job and runs away?

Peter looks at the mud on his boots: proper Devon clay, heavy and cloying, holding him down. He’s not tasted salt on the air for a good month now or felt rolling movement under his feet, never ever quite still. He doesn’t miss it, but perhaps it was better for him. Perhaps, back on a ship and far from the desire to put down roots with other people, he could avoid this mess of complex feeling and desire.

Perhaps leaving the farm is best for all of them, right now. The removal of his thoughtless cruelty, lashing out because his - perversions - make others uncomfortable, can only make their lives better.

He’ll go with the tide.

* * *

Peter and Alex reunite over lunch, having spent the morning licking their wounds over separate jobs. The arrangement battled out by Alex and Ruth whilst Peter had shut the chickens in had allowed Ruth to leave with a little bit of all of everyone’s money and a promise of reimbursement at a later date, when such things can be afforded; Peter doesn’t mind, even if it’s money he’ll not see on the rolling waves of the North Sea or in the surreal blue of the Mediterranean. It seems to sit well enough with Alex, and they even manage civil conversation over bread and cheese, though it lacks their usual affectionate bickering.

The afternoon runs slow as treacle as the boys work on the steep slopes of the market garden. It’s one of the few things they can still do without the cart, and it’ll get some much-needed attention for a few days until the cartwright has affixed the new wheel. Without Alex’s usual cheerful chatter to keep them going, the two hours they spend in the cold seem twice as long.

A drip on the back of his neck is all, for a second or two. Peter looks up, poised, to find Alex watching him back. Another raindrop hits the ground between them, and they wait, half an eye on the sky.

A drop hits his hand. One lands on Alex’s upturned cheek.

And then there is water _everywhere._

Alex yelps in alarm as what feels like two inches of rain abruptly drenches them and Peter can’t help a startled bark of laughter. Despite himself, Alex grins, and it’s so abruptly, unfairly beautiful that Peter could stand here in the downpour for hours and just look. Alex stares right back at him, lips still curved up in an amused little smile, and Peter forgets about everything that’s going so horribly, terribly wrong.

But then Alex shakes himself out of it, grabbing his discarded coat and hurling it over his head in a makeshift tent. Peter collects up their tools and chases Alex back to the farmhouse and indoors out of the deluge.

They’re both soaked to the skin in just the few minutes spent out in the rain, and Peter can’t help laughing when Alex shakes his head, sending water flying like a particularly poorly-behaved dog. “What a dignified gent you are, Alex,” he mutters, hanging his coat on a peg to drip onto the floor and draping his waistcoat over the back of a chair.

“Oi,” Alex says, laughing. Peter smiles at him: his longest and best friend, even with all their recent nonsense. He’s in his shirtsleeves too, damp white shirt clinging to his slender frame, and he looks so like the Alex of their university days that Peter pulls up their chairs to the stove without a thought, gesturing for Alex to sit beside him and dry out a little.

It’s nice to sit and gently steam for an hour or so, occupying themselves in companionable silence with cleaning boots and sharpening tools. They might, back in December, have filled the time with talking, but at present a little quiet coexistence is far easier on Peter’s nerves; no fear of saying the wrong thing. He’ll have to say, eventually, about his intention to leave, but-

“Peter,” Alex says hesitantly, breaking into his reverie.

“Hmm?”

“I’m sorry.”

Peter looks up, hands stilling on the tools in his lap, but Alex is still looking down and violently rubbing beeswax and turpentine into his boots. He’s not sure what to do, honestly. Alex apologising to him was not a scenario he had envisioned, although he can’t presently think why; Alex is a genuinely nice person and it cannot have escaped him that he’s upset Peter.

“I was terribly rude to you, and to Ruth, and I am sorry,” Alex continues, keeping his eyes fixed on his task. “You aren’t just my employees, you’re my friends; I’ve been rotten, and I am sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” Peter says. “I pushed you too much when you wanted space. We - Ruth and I - just wanted to spend some time with you and we didn’t think of your feelings.”

Alex looks up, surprised. “I was giving _you_ space,” he blurts out. Peter’s confusion must show on his face, because Alex gains a blush high on his cheeks and looks away again. “I thought - you and Ruth might- Never mind.”

“Oh,” Peter says. Alex had thought they were- “We’re not,” he says, and he’s fairly sure his own face is as red as Alex’s, now.

“Right,” Alex says, sounding a little strangled.

There’s a good five minutes of silence after that, in which they return to their tasks with vim and vigour and nervous energy. But there is, for all the awkwardness of misunderstanding and discussion of feelings, a sense of relaxation in the air, as if the bonds that keep the pair of them threaded together have been untangled somewhat.

“I really - value you, you know,” Alex says quietly. This time, when Peter looks up, Alex’s sharp eyes are gazing back earnestly. “On the farm, and as a friend. Truly. I should hate to lose that over nothing.”

“I value you too,” Peter says. “You won’t, I promise.”

Alex reaches out and grabs Peter’s hand, shaking it warmly and beaming. It feels like a pact, and Peter dismisses all thought of tides and travel. He’ll make it up to Ruth, and they’ll all be friends again, and nothing more. That will be enough.

Although- Peter frowns. “Ruth’s been gone a terribly long time,” he says, still absently gripping Alex’s hand.

Alex looks out of the window at the pounding rain, biting his lip in consternation. “Perhaps she’s taken shelter somewhere,” he says rather hopefully.

“Yes,” Peter agrees, “that’s it.”

It’s more of a prayer than a certainty, and they both know it.

* * *

The rain has not let up once since the heavens opened at two and darkness now obscures the watery world outside. Alex is nervously opening and closing cupboards at random as if about to start cooking dinner; Peter has taken to agitated pacing.

Thunder rolls and they both look anxiously out of the window into the cold wind and rain. Peter opens his mouth, ready to declare his intent to go out in search of Ruth, but Alex tilts his head, frowning, and holds up a hand for Peter to listen. Under the drumming of rain on earth and stone, there’s another noise: iron horseshoes on cobbled stone, and Alex and Peter are running out into the blinding rain.

Prince is walking up towards the stables, and Peter spares a moment to be thankful that the old boy knows his way home because slumped on his back with her face buried in the draft horse’s neck is Ruth, looking like nothing more than a pile of wet clothes. Alex is at his heels as he races across the flooded yard, squinting against the driving rain and skidding to a stop at Prince’s side.

“Ruth?” Peter shouts over the sound of the rain, but there’s no response. Peter’s whole heart stops for a good two seconds, but then Ruth’s eye opens and fixes upon his face and he can breathe again.

“Get her inside, quickly,” Alex yells. “I’ll put Prince away.”

Peter reaches up gently, placing a hand on her waist. “Ruth, can you sit up for me?” he says, but she just blinks at him. He watches her hand, excruciatingly slowly, untense to let go of the reins, and when he looks back at her face she just blinks again: _see?_ “Alright,” he says. “You’re alright. Let’s get you down and inside, shall we?”

Peter keeps up a reassuring babble of nonsense as he gently pulls Ruth off the shire’s broad back, taking her weight in his arms instead. As soon as she’s safely cradled against his chest he walks as briskly as he deems safe towards the light and warmth of inside, hunching over her in a desperate effort to keep the worst of the weather from her.

He installs her in his own chair by the stove. She’s too stiff to move much, just following him silently with her eyes as he flutters about, boiling a kettle and finding a blanket to wrap around her sodden shoulders, and she’s cold; far too cold. Everything she has on is soaked through and frozen, and he does his best to ignore the cold lurch of horror in his stomach that accompanies the thought of him stripping her of her clothes. Peter will not be that man, not when she cannot stop him, cannot protest, when he’s not even sure he is a man that she presently ever wants to see.

He helps her out of her coat and wraps her in a dry blanket instead, and kneels at her frozen feet to work her boots and stockings off carefully, replacing them with the thickest socks he can find. And then he stops, because she’s shivering - which is marginally better than the utter stillness that had scared him so terribly - but he cannot think how to warm her up without touching her.

A cold fingertip prods him in the head and he startles. Ruth is trembling head to toe, but she manages to smile down at him. “Cold,” she stammers around a mouthful of chattering teeth. “Can’t...buttons.”

Peter closes his eyes briefly. That is fairly obviously consent, he has to admit, but. “When Alex gets back,” he says. He’ll not be found stripping a defenceless lady.

Ruth prods him again, harder. “Cold,” she insists.

Fortunately Alex returns then, shutting the world out and pushing his sodden hair out of his face. “How is she?” he says, hurrying closer, and Peter is ever so grateful to have him by his side.

“Cold,” Ruth chatters crossly, and Peter can’t help a tiny huff of amusement at the petulant note in her tone.

“It’s her clothes,” he says. “They’re bloody freezing.”

“Right,” Alex says, after a moment to digest that. “Alright, Ruth?”

“Yes,” she stammers, inarticulate fingers already trying to fumble at her shirt collar. She gives up with a frustrated noise after only a second.

“I’ve got it,” Alex says gently. “Don’t you worry. We’ve got it.”

The shirt is no trouble; Ruth sits very still and lets them work carefully, avoiding her pale, lightly freckled skin with their hands and quickly wrapping a blanket about her before they can see any more than flashes of skin which they do their best to ignore. But her legs are still too stiff to hold her weight and Peter ends up standing with his arms around her blanketed shoulders and her face in the crook of his neck, leaning into him until he’s really all that’s holding her upright so that Alex can remove her skirt, made three times heavier by the weight of water. It’s silent but for the gentle crackling of the fire and the persistent deluge outside, and rather peaceful, but for the underlying tension. There is almost no way that Ruth will get through a whole afternoon in the worst rainstorm Peter has seen for years without any kind of illness, and after the wheel they’ve not got a great deal of money to pay a doctor. Even then, Peter’s known enough to die of the ‘flu with the very best of care. So he holds her tightly, feeling her shiver, and sends prayer after prayer heavenward, because it’s all he can do.

Once she’s wrapped in all the blankets that Alex can find in the house, Peter goes to sit her back down. A small, firm hand clenches in his shirt and halts him long enough for Ruth to glare at him from within her woollen cocoon.

“You’re warm,” she says, still stumbling with shivers.

Peter stops, unsure of what, exactly, she intends him to do about that. She sends a look to Alex, who appears to understand. “Sit,” he says, prodding Peter into a chair before the stove.

Ruth collapses inelegantly on top of him and he wheezes in surprise as the air is knocked from his lungs. After a brief shuffle, though, she curls into his chest, cheek pressed to his breastbone and damp hair tucked under his chin, and closes her eyes with a contented noise. Peter wraps his arms about her on instinct and something within him relaxes. He’ll have to apologise to her properly, quite possibly on his hands and knees in the dirt at her feet, but at present she is content to have him sit quietly and hold her and Peter is more than content to oblige. She fits very well against him, and some latent protective instinct makes itself known to point out that this is quite possibly the happiest it’s ever been. Her slight frame is still wracked with shivers but they’re slowing, and the face that’s pressed tightly to him no longer feels so icy through the thin cotton of his shirt. Peter closes his eyes briefly and impulsively presses his lips to the crown of her head.

When he looks up, Alex has stopped halfway through warming some stew that Ruth had cooked and set aside and is staring at the pair of them piled up by the stove. Peter almost wants to say - something; anything that would explain that they aren’t courting, and that Alex shouldn’t, _mustn’t_ pull away. But then Alex smiles, soft and fond, and Peter recognises it from his own face: it’s just how Peter looks at Alex and Ruth together.

* * *

The rain hasn’t stopped, come dawn’s half-hearted attempt at light, and Peter is beginning to fear that some integral part of the farm is liable to be washed away by the persistent downpour. There is already a layer of water sitting on the flagstones and a veritable river running down the path, and Ruth’s windowsill affords an excellent view of a rather miserable herd of cows sheltering in the barn. From up here he can also watch Alex, wrapped in their one good oilskin coat, running from one feeding trough to another as fast as his boots can carry him. He feels rather bad about forcing the man out to charge through deepening puddles on his own, but Alex had insisted.

Because Ruth had not awoken at her usual hour that morning. She had slept through the boys waking up and making tea and producing breakfast, and had remained asleep when Peter and Alex had cautiously ventured upstairs to investigate. Ruth had stirred at Alex’s hand on her forehead, blinking blearily against the washed-out light, and even managed a little hot water, honey and lemon - this being the best that Alex and Peter could think to provide on short notice - but had then turned her flushed face into her pillow and returned to sleep once more.

So Peter is presently sitting here, on her windowsill, and watching the raindrops slide past outside with one eye, the other keeping vigil on the steady rise and fall of the blankets covering Ruth. This alone is comforting; simply watching her breathe, in and out. Every so often her tiny frame shudders with a terrible cough and Peter’s heart seizes in worry, the noise too loud for the little room, but then she settles again, and Peter fusses with her blankets to keep them smoothed around her. Her face, all that he can see in the mass of bedlinens, is hot and red and covered in a thin sheen of sweat, but she shivers violently if any blanket is removed from the bed, and Peter can’t bear it but he just doesn’t know what to _do_ and-

Alex offers him a sympathetic and slightly damp smile as he enters, and Peter tries very hard to calm down. “How is she?” he murmurs.

“No change,” Peter replies, just as soft. Alex presses the backs of his fingers to her forehead and hums thoughtfully at whatever he feels there, before coming to lean against the sill by Peter’s side. “I don’t know what to do,” he mumbles, looking at his feet.

Alex sighs, wrapping an arm about Peter’s shoulders. “We’ll just have to wait and see, I’m afraid. Plenty of rest, beef tea and water when we can, and if she’s not better in a week we’re to see a doctor.” Peter offers him a sidelong glance and he shrugs, colouring a little. “I found Ruth’s book of home medicines.”

Peter smiles, leaning into Alex’s side. It’s a tremendous comfort to hear that Alex has some idea of what they are supposed to be doing, and that what they are supposed to be doing is, in fact, what they _are_ doing, but he cannot quite fight off a residual tension that makes him press gently into Alex in an effort to absorb some comfort and calm.

“My turn to go out, then, Doctor Langlands,” Peter says, pulling away and standing when he’s stolen as much as he can.

“You’re sure?” Alex says. If given the chance, Alex would probably let Peter sit inside all day - the man is kind that way - but Peter waves him off.

“Perfectly,” he replies with bracing and feigned confidence. He’s not at all worried about being out in the rain, but a little crevice of his mind is terrified of not being there if Ruth needs him. The larger part of him, however, is paralysed by the thought that Ruth might need someone and that Peter will not have the requisite skills to do anything for her, and with that on the table Peter would rather wade through a biblical flood than sit in wait for that moment.

“Come in before you get too horribly damp, then,” Alex says, settling in the chair at Ruth’s bedside with _The Book of the Farm_. “Can’t have you getting sick too.”

* * *

In his selfish naivety, Peter had supposed that this all-consuming fear of Ruth not getting better would be the worst of it all. Even out in the rain, clearing the dam in the stream to drain the flooded fields or trying to block the crack under the stable door to keep the water out, he can’t help but fret; when she manages to sip beef tea from a cup cradled in Alex’s gentle hands, Peter worries that she’s not had enough, and when she’s too tired to lift her head it’s worse. Ruth feels so light, too light; paper-thin as she rests against his chest and Alex feeds her oh-so-carefully, his face trapped in a tiny concerned frown just inches from Peter’s own. It’s the easiest way they have found to get her upright and drinking; Peter sitting sideways, back against the headboard, and Ruth propped up in his arms against his chest. Like this, Alex can help her to drink and Peter can feel her breathing, but he hates it. Like this, Peter is forcibly confronted with how terribly light she is; nothing like her usual force-of-nature self.

But this is not the worst of it. Ruth’s dreams are the worst of it.

Ruth seems half-asleep whenever she is awake, looking about her with wide, faintly bewildered and slightly glassy eyes. Asleep, however, and dreaming, Ruth screams.

All they can do is stroke her fevered brow and murmur what they fervently hope are comforting words as Ruth thrashes in bed, her face screwed up in distress. But it’s so difficult; Ruth seems to be somewhere else, almost, and talking to her is as effective as shouting at a closed door, but she is so clearly, horribly distressed that seeing her causes genuine, physical pain to bloom in Peter’s chest. He’d do anything to stop it.

“No,” Ruth sobs, eyes screwed tightly shut.

“Hush,” Peter says, abandoning his darning in a clatter of needles and reels and flying from his chair to kneel by her head. “Hush, Ruth, it’s alright, I promise.”

“Don’t go,” she begs. “Don’t leave me, _please_ , don’t go.”

“I won’t,” he soothes, stroking his fingers gently through her sweat-sticky hair without even noticing. “I’m here, dearest, I will not go anywhere.”

Ruth pushes into the contact with his hand. “ _Please._ ”

It’s such a broken, pleading little noise that Peter momentarily takes leave of his senses; temporary insanity certainly seems to be the most likely explanation for his actions. He moves to sit beside her on the bed, cooing gentle nonsense and stroking her hair as he toes off his boots, and then stretches himself out beside her on top of the covers.

Barely has he done so before Ruth latches on to his shirt and presses her face into his chest. Peter continues to murmur softly and without thought as he strokes her long, fine hair and pulls the blankets tighter about her. Even covered in a thick layer of blankets she’s so very slight, pressed under his chin with his arm resting about her, but with his back between her and the door and her breath coming in slow, even puffs against his collarbone, he no longer feels quite such devastating fear about it.

The door cracks open and Peter peers over his shoulder to see Alex yawning in the doorway. They’re both so tired, these past few days having come thick and fast and with very little sleep due to a house, farm and invalid all in need of attention at all hours, and Peter can quite relate to the sentiment as Alex brings up a hand belatedly to disguise the evidence of his exhaustion. Alex blinks at him and tilts his head in silent question.

“It seems to help,” Peter explains, a little guiltily. “With the dreams. She calmed down, so I thought-”

He wants to go on; it’s important to him that Alex know that _this_ is nothing that Alex need pull away from, that he’s not now unwelcome, but Alex nods in easy acceptance and slumps in Peter’s abandoned chair. “Good to know,” he mumbles around another jaw-cracking yawn. “I’ll do dinner in a minute.”

Peter watches his slow blinks and bone-deep tiredness and smiles fondly. “Go to sleep, you daft old thing.”

Alex manages a grin and props his feet up on the bed against Peter’s thighs, slumping in the chair. “Well, if you insist.”

It’s easier to mind the quiet when it’s broken by soft snoring, and easier to take care of Ruth with good company just a well-aimed kick away. Peter focusses on the gentle pressure of Alex’s foot against his legs and counts the soft breaths against his skin until he realises: the quality of the silence has changed.

At last. The rain has stopped.

* * *

Ruth’s fever breaks around dinnertime the next day. The angry flush on her face settles into something resembling her usual colour and her breathing consistently evens until she could just be exhausted after a long day. Alex cradles her through another nightmare while Peter does the morning feed, but Ruth then manages to spend the rest of the day resting until Alex feels her forehead after supper and mutters a brief and utterly heartfelt prayer in relief.

Alex forces Peter into bed early so that at least one of them is ready for the following day, insisting that he keep one last vigil over Ruth _just in case._ He puts up a token fight about it, but Peter has spent several hours chasing wayward teenaged calves on even fewer hours of proper sleep and his resistance wavers and crumbles at little more than a stern look.

He wakes late, unseasonable sunshine streaming across his pillow, and stumbles out of bed to shuffle into Ruth’s room without thought. Peter rubs his eyes and yawns, leaning against the door jamb; sunlight creates a long path from the parted curtains to the bed, lighting upon discarded blankets strewn upon the floor and Alex sprawled atop the bedcovers with an arm around Ruth, and Ruth herself, eyes open and smiling fondly up at him.

Peter blinks. “G’monin,” he manages.

Ruth presses her fingers to her face, muffling her giggles and entirely failing to hide her bright, broad smile; for this, Peter is exceptionally grateful. His heart grows three sizes in appreciation. “Good morning,” she says softly, reaching out her hand.

He kneels by her head and holds her fingers gently in his own broad hand. Here, Peter can see Alex’s face, softened in sleep and with only the tiniest frown line between his brows. It’s rather tempting to reach out and smooth it away, but Peter’s loathe to disturb him. There are huge purple shadows beneath his long lashes and his jaw is prickly with untidy stubble; Peter knows that, if he cared to look, his own face would be found in a similar state. Ruth looks a little tired, too, but so much vastly better than she has done. Her eyes are open and bright and her voice, though a little husky from lack of use, is no longer pained; Peter thinks she may never have looked lovelier.

“How are you feeling?” he says, smoothing his thumb over her knuckles in slow, gentle swipes.

“Mmm.” Ruth looks thoughtful, shifting slightly as if testing each part of herself for pain. “Rather hot - I couldn’t get many blankets out from under this one,” she says, jutting her chin at Alex’s sleeping form. “I’m a little crushed, too, honestly. But no longer unwell.”

She smiles at him and Peter flushes a little. “Yes. We, ah, found that - sometimes - when you were dreaming, it helped. If we - well. I’ll move him-”

“Don’t you dare,” Ruth says, squeezing his hand as he makes to prod Alex awake. “I don’t mind it, truly. Besides, he looks like he needs the rest, the poor thing - the both of you do.” She moves their joined hands to run her thumb over his chin and what is quickly becoming a fully-fledged beard. “You are rather unkempt. I must be a state,” she says, frowning and attempting to unpin her arm from under Alex to feel her hair.

“You look lovely,” Peter blurts out, and, well. It’s true, even if he hadn’t meant to say it; just seeing her awake and alert, clever eyes taking in every detail and storing it for later, is enough for Peter. Ruth looks away with a shy smile, and Peter cannot do anything but adore.

Ruth skims their joined hands over his beard again, smile turning distinctly mischievous. “You look like a wildman.”

“Loss of your civilising influence,” Peter suggests with a smile, and Ruth laughs softly. She looks so pretty in the early morning sunshine, hair copper and shining and her smile best and brightest of all, and how could he ever hurt her? “Ruth,” he begins softly, “I am so sorry. I did not mean the things I said to you before you left. I was angry and I should never have hurt you. You are the wisest person I know and we’ve been a mess without your instruction. I have never thought that way about you, truly, and I can only beg your forgiveness.” He rests his head by their joined hands, preferring to press his face into soft sheets and blindly await his fate than watch Ruth weigh his heart against a feather in her hands.

She rubs her thumb against his hand. “You hurt me deeply,” she says, and it’s impossible from her tone to decipher her thoughts.

Peter nods, face still against the sheets. “I know. I was unacceptable.” His voice is slightly muffled by the sheets and it hides the tightness in his tone. Ruth has fought all her life for every scrap of knowledge, every inch of freedom that she has, and she clings to them with nails dug in deep. Of course it hurt when Peter thoughtlessly ripped them away.

“You were. But you were hurting too, and for that I will forgive you - _if_ you make up with Alex.”

Peter has been so caught up in care and fear and exhaustion for the past few days that it takes him a moment to remember the afternoon hiding from the rain in front of the stove. He tips his head up to show her a shy smile. “We did, before you even came home.”

Ruth’s stern expression relaxes into a smile and she squeezes his hand. “Good. I’m sick and tired of being miserable.”

Alex mumbles something in his sleep and the frown line deepens until Peter gives in, reaching out with the pad of his thumb to push the wrinkle smooth. When he pulls back Alex’s face is clear for a moment; soft and unworried. And then Alex blinks his eyes open, lashes fluttering against the sudden influx of light.

“Morning,” Ruth sing-songs sweetly, and Peter grins at Alex’s moment of bewilderment.

“Hullo,” he manages at last, sitting up a bit and grinning with some embarrassment. His eyes flit to the window and he frowns at the amount of daylight without. “Have you fed the animals, Peter?”

“Well, I had thought that the chap staying awake to keep vigil might prod me if I slept in,” Peter begins mock-thoughtfully, and Ruth giggles as Alex’s cheeks redden slightly. “But he did not, as it happens, so no.”

Alex huffs at his watch in irritation. “Will you be alright on your own, Ruth? If Peter and I run, the cows might eventually forgive us.”

“Go on,” Ruth says, amused. She squeezes Peter’s hand before letting go when his reluctance to leave this room of soft fabric and soft words and gentle golden light becomes apparent. “I’ll still be here when you get back.” And perhaps she could hear his mumbled platitudes through her dreams, because she tips her chin up to offer him a comforting smile, and says, “I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note to self: writing about people crying makes you almost cry. don't do that.


	3. Lady Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ah, whate'er the darkness covers,   
> And whate'er we sing or say,   
> Would you climb the wall of heaven an hour too soon   
> If you knew a place for lovers   
> Where the apple-blossoms stray   
> Out of heaven to sway and whisper to the moon?
> 
> \- Alfred Noyes

“Are you sure you’re quite-”

Ruth is quite proud of that withering glare. It sends Peter into slightly embarrassed silence with impressive alacrity, his lips pressed together and dark eyes shooting her a rather reproachful look under his eyelashes. Alex is quite obviously trying not to laugh as he laces his boots on the steps, and she’s glad of the allegiance that implies. Peter isn’t; he leans out of his chair to smack Alex’s upper arm.

His yelp incites little response from Ruth. By her reckoning, she was in bed for a week, gently pottering about inside for a further two, and practically scratching the walls of the cottage down with a desire to get out into the world for yet another week. Neatly binding sunshine-bright daffodils is all well and good, but the kitchen table is a poor substitute for fresh air in the market garden. Every time she’s picked up anything heavier than a kettle Alex or Peter has miraculously appeared at her elbow to relieve her of it and insist that she sit down, rest, recover - only she has successfully done all three of those things, now, and if this behaviour continues then she’s liable to do something that will land her either in Dartmoor Prison or Bedlam.

But! Today is the day. Having seen little more of February and March than the Lady of Shalott might have, St Joseph’s Day marks the point at which - finally! - Alex and Peter are more-or-less happy to let her get back to her sorely neglected work. The light that had crept under her curtains as she dressed had been brighter than usual, the year finally beginning to roll around into sunnier weather, and Ruth is itching to rip open the door and hear her heels click on the cobbles, feel the sun on her face, and let the wind snatch at her skirts like a grasping child.

“I am perfectly well,” she says archly, and Peter sighs. He slumps back in his chair, tilting his head and offering her a faintly apologetic smile. His concern is, of course, tremendously endearing and after a rather tumultuous start to the year entirely explicable; Peter has developed the rather sweet tendency to spend his every waking hour doing something nice for or with Alex and Ruth, and it’s lovely - with a taut undercurrent of anxiety, as if Peter is afraid that one or other of them might vanish if he doesn’t try hard enough. Ruth understands this, and she’d dearly like to do something about it, if she can.

But she is no Lady of Shalott, nor a distressed damsel to be kept in an ivory tower. She is not paid to be one, either, although the subject of finances is at present one to be avoided, just in case. Ruth is itching to move and work and  _ do _ something, and so it is with some enthusiasm that she spins on her heel in a flurry of skirts and hauls the door open and-

-and bursts out laughing.

Alex yelps again, raising a hand to shield his eyes against the sudden influx of light. Peter makes a startled noise, and then says, “Ruth, don’t - you can’t-”

Not heeding him in the slightest, Ruth launches herself out of the door and lands squarely on two feet, ankle-deep in a snowdrift. She has to screw her eyes up against the light that reflects sharply off every available surface, all coated in a blanket of snow or a slick sheen of ice under the bright winter sun, and when she turns back to look inside the cottage it’s abruptly too dark to see anything at all.

Alex and Peter can see her, though. Her huge bright grin is, she’s sure, rather hard to miss.

“Ruth,” Peter says rather reproachfully, but there’s a touch of a smile in his voice as if, despite himself, he is also finding the sudden - and slightly unseasonal - spring snow scene before him rather enchanting.

Alex bounds out of the cottage, kicking up great sprays of snow and entirely ruining the clear blank canvas that had covered the yard. Ruth can’t help laughing at his childish glee, lighting up his slightly cold-reddened cheeks and rendering him rather astonishingly charming - but Ruth is now quite used to finding one or other (and often both) of the boys quite charming, and manages to rein in an obvious response. “Come on, Peter!” he calls back to the man now propped disapprovingly against the door jamb.

“You’ll catch cold,” Peter chides, and then he’s squawking and spitting out snow and stumbling away, and Alex has a hand clutched to his chest as he howls with laughter, and Ruth is beaming through her assumed innocence. “You-” Peter manages, looking at her with a distinctly betrayed expression as he wipes the remainder of her snowball from his jaw. 

Ruth folds her frozen hands behind her back and raises her eyebrow in challenge. “Yes?” she inquires politely.

Ruth has not ever been afraid of Peter or Alex. They’re big strapping lads, but entirely harmless; she’s never had cause to worry that the strength they have at their disposal might be used against her. Despite this, there is a moment of distinct regret as Peter’s expression shifts into mischievous determination and he begins to sprint towards her.

Peter wraps his arms around her knees and hefts her - easily, as if she weighs nothing at all - over one shoulder, ignoring her giggling shriek. He spins her without effort, the wintery world flying past her eyes barely more than a white blur, and settles to beam at a laughing Alex. “Shall we feed some frosty animals, Alex?” he says.

“Why not,” Alex replies, long fingers coming up to poorly disguise his amusement.

“Put me down!” Ruth laughingly whines. In truth, she’s little objection to remaining pressed into Peter’s warmth, his strong arm about her in a strange embrace, and coming along with the boys on their rounds of the farm, but. The boys are expecting her to demand escape, not huddle closer, and so she shall.

“Off we go, then,” Peter says, ignoring her entirely but for his bright grin. His path takes him near the wall - near enough for Ruth to stretch out her cold fingers and collect up some snow, and for Alex to see her do this and say nothing to save his friend, and for Ruth to shove her handful of snow down the back of his shirt. He yelps, his grip shifts, and Ruth uses his broad shoulders to push off and wriggle free, stumbling away into the snow.

Alex almost falls over laughing at Peter’s expression of shocked horror. Ruth takes the opportunity presented to her and flees, her laughter hanging crisp on the cool air.

* * *

Delightful though the snow briefly is, a thousand and one concerns about it crop up over the breakfast table. Alex presses his cold hands to his tea cup, frowning into its depths. “Will the crops be alright, do you think?”

It’s a futile question; if any of them would know about the crops, it would be Alex. Ruth offers him a bolstering smile anyway. “I’m sure they will.”

“It’s the sheep I’m worried about,” Peter points out. “We’re lambing soon enough, and I’d rather not do it in the snow.”

“At least we got the daffs in,” Ruth says, resolutely attempting to maintain jollity. They’re all correct, though; this is a poorly timed cold snap with potentially rather serious consequences for the animals and the crops and, therefore, the future of the farm, but there is equally nothing to be done about it. The weather will do very much as it will, and no amount of fretting is liable to do anything about it.

“I suppose there is that,” Alex says, mustering up a smile in return. “We’re almost rich.”

“Thank heaven for rich city folk, who can’t wait three weeks for a bunch of flowers,” Peter says, and Ruth smiles into her tea. They’re tremendously easy to be fond of, these boys; just a little hope and high spirits and they return quickly to affectionate bickering and endearing nonsense. Good, kind gentlemen, who respect her and treat her well: Ruth can ask for no more.

Neither can she expect any more, although this is often more difficult to remember.

Ruth is under no illusions about her position in the world. As a widow the expectation for her to marry is at least somewhat diminished, but an unmarried lady attempting to live respectably under her no influence but her own - well, this arrangement with Alex and Peter is very likely the best she is going to get. Employers who are willing to put up with her inherent, deep-seated need for independence are few and far between, and to find one willing to treat her as an equal member of the household is rather too much luck to expect twice. Every time Alex consults her for her honest opinion, or Peter makes her laugh, or she is treated to even the smallest kindness like a cup of tea without asking or a blanket about her shoulders of an evening, Ruth is near-painfully aware that the time she spends here, in this little cottage with people who respect her and care for her, is quite likely to be the happiest of her life. Furthermore, every time that Alex pens a letter to Miss Bexleigh, with whom he maintains a rather sporadic correspondence, or that Peter blushes prettily at the grocer’s daughter in town, or that Maggie, meaning well, asks if Alex seems liable to marry yet, Ruth is reminded in excruciating detail that  _ this cannot last. _

Alex and Peter are well-bred, polite and kind gentlemen. They are educated and sweet and men of some means; to pretend that they might not marry some very suitable young ladies is willfully foolish at best. There are a variety of roads that the future might run down after this event and Ruth cannot pretend to know which is most likely, but as she is presently filling a role usually occupied by a wife it remains somewhat difficult to imagine that Ruth has any place in this future. The only vision she can foresee that leaves her here involves Mr and Mrs Langlands moving out but retaining the cottage for reasons of their own - but Ruth will not be kept on charity, thank you, like a poor relation left in the dower cottage to bump shoulders with ghosts alone. She would not live that way, even if Alex were both kind and cruel enough to suggest it.

In truth it is not only friendly affection and financial concerns that leave her fretting for a future with no Alex and Peter within. She is, despite her best efforts, rather too fond of them both; there is no one else, heaven and earth, with whom she would rather spend her time, and from this Ruth is forced to conclude that she is, unfortunately, in love with both Alex and Peter in equal and fervent measure. It still feels rather unlikely; she’s certainly never heard of one person bearing such love for two others, and such a  _ menage a trois _ is not something she can imagine polite society thinking very much of. It feels rather sordid, almost, to think of it that way, when really she simply - adores them. Wholeheartedly. Ruth merely wishes to have them safe and happy and, preferably, with her as much as possible, that she might be better able to bask in the sunshine of their smiles.

But. What she dearly wants she clearly cannot have. Alex and Peter will end up married to other people, and she will end up somewhere else, and so for the meantime she will clutch the moments that she has tightly, and do nothing that might upset the delicate equilibrium they have only just reclaimed.

Even if her dreams are full of gently whispered words: Peter, stroking her hair, and whispering  _ promise _ and  _ alright _ and  _ dearest _ like a prayer; Alex at her side, humming a song he doesn’t know the words to into her temple but always remembering snatches of the refrain -  _ I would love you all the day, over the hills and far away. _ She remembers the comforting weight of him sprawled atop her bedcovers and the gentle puffs of breath against her neck, and she remembers Peter kneeling penitently at her bedside and so gently holding her hand, but she cannot be sure that what her dreams conjure up for her sleeping mind to enjoy are anything more than fictions she herself has invented. Ruth had been in the grips of a vicious fever: of course her delirium would create something bizarre and unhelpfully label it fact.

Alex catches her eye and raises his eyebrow in concern, and she shakes herself out of her reverie. “Away with the faeries,” she says with a smile.

“You’re not unwell?”

“Oh, don’t you start,” she says, clearing breakfast debris from the table in part to shelter her grin at Peter’s laughter. They mustn’t know how she feels; too much depends upon this living arrangement to disrupt it over dreaming, however real it had felt.

* * *

Peter cries when the first lamb is born.

Only a little: two errant tears wiped away on his wrists with a slightly shaky laugh, kneeling beside the ewe and her tiny, stumbling child. Lamb A - Agnes - is born on a sunny dawn, out of the snow in the barn, and poor, sleepy Peter is rumpled from his restless night and his hair is a wild nest of curls and in the early morning light he looks entirely angelic. The light that tumbles into the barn haloes him; the loose white shirt that he has stripped down to is his wings; the beam he treats Ruth to as she presses a cup of tea into his hands his wordless benediction.

Ruth combs her fingers idly through his hair, enjoying the novelty of his head being within easy reach, and he leans into her side. With his head propped on her hip, they watch the lamb’s first minutes in reverent silence. She loves him, she loves him, she says nothing.

Alex’s first lamb is a surprise.

Ruth and Peter are busy with pigsty maintenance, and Alex is only supposed to be ensuring that the sheep are well-fed. He returns later than expected, looking shocked and almost a little confused. “A - a baby,” he says, pointing his thumb over his shoulder at the barn.

Ruth looks at Peter, seeing her alarm mirrored on his face. “A baby? Out in the snow?” she says, heart constricting in concern as she leaves the pigsty. It’s not wholly impossible that a desperate mother might abandon her child, but in this weather! What are they to do with the poor child - contact the authorities? Is there a foundling hospital nearby?

“Where did you leave it?” Peter asks, clambering over the wall and frowning at Alex as if the infant might have been concealed about his person.

“In the barn - it’s a sheep. A baby sheep,” Alex amends, holding his hands out to ward off their latent parental instincts. “A lamb.”

There is a pause, until Peter catches Ruth’s eye and dissolves into laughter. “Honestly, Alex,” she says, grinning through her put-upon expression.

Alex grins and rubs the back of his neck in embarrassment. Peter slings an arm about his shoulders. “Congratulations, old thing; you’re a father.”

And if Ruth’s dreams that night happened to contain Alex, cradling a baby -  _ their _ baby - and softly singing to the tiny dark-haired head cocooned in blankets, that is no business but her own. It certainly has no place in their conversations.

The last lamb has Alex and Peter waking her in the middle of the night, cold and desperate and afraid.

“The other one was alright,” Alex rambles, twining white knuckles in his agitation. “But this one isn’t warm and the mother won’t take her and I know you can’t do anything, but-”

Ruth looks at the too-small bundle of blankets pressed to Peter’s chest. The lamb is far too cold, blue-tinged and almost dead, and it’s almost certainly too late.

_ Almost? _ the ghost of her granny says, all valley-vowels and mild disapproval.

Peter lets her take the lamb; she gets the impression that he has already cut his losses and given up on the little thing, which makes her ever-so-slightly less nervous about opening the warming draw of the stove and sliding the tiny blue body in. The confusion radiating from her companions is nearly tangible, but they do not question her as she kneels before the stove to watch and wait and pray silently. Her granny had done this, once, when she was a child and had believed it magic; take a lamb, nearly-dead, and warm it until...

The lamb twitches, shakes, and bleats mournfully. Ruth sits back on her heels and sighs in relief. Alex laughs in surprised delight - what a beautiful sound - and Peter breathes out, shaky and slow. “You are - a miracle,” he says warmly.

Ruth turns over one shoulder to grin up at them. There’s an incredulous joy spread across both their faces, and the lamplight softens them around the edges; there’s a feeling of faint unreality about this moment. It’s a between-time - between days, between life and death, between light and dark - and though Ruth is not quite sure what else she is balancing between, she holds her breath for it anyway. “Who is, me or the lamb?”

Peter shrugs expansively. “Either. Both. I’m amazed.”

The lamb is returned to its mother and sister fast enough for it not to be much missed. They stand, the three of them, in the gloomy barn and watch her be licked clean, kept safe, held close and warm.

“That’s all our lambs,” Alex says quietly. “Every single one. Not bad for our first time - and in a snowstorm, at that.”

Ruth tucks her hands into their arms and they obligingly press closer to her, warm and solid but gentle. “They had good shepherds.”

“I’ve decided: you are the miracle,” Peter says. “You saved that lamb’s life - honestly, Ruth, I could kiss you.”

It’s the unreality in the air; the half-light of half-night just before dawn, the soft silhouettes instead of sharp images, the quiet-that-isn’t-quiet of a farm in the country at night. It’s these little last gentle words and tiny kindnesses and the way that she never wants to be anywhere but here, pressed between Alex and Peter.

“You can. If you’d like.”

Nothing changes and everything does. In some imperceptible way the atmosphere alters, as if the horizon has shifted two degrees upon its axis and the world is merely holding its breath as it waits for reality to come flooding back. Ruth keeps her eyes ahead and attempts to remain perfectly calm as her whole future rests upon supports which she has, with four little words, just made into matchsticks.

Peter says nothing, but she sees him, out of the corner of her eye, look at Alex. He must see something there that galvanises him, though Ruth cannot imagine what, because he gently separates her hand from his arm to step around and stand before her, and-

His hand is on her hip, and for a moment that gentle contact is all she can think about; broad, warm, pressing but not insistent - she could step easily away, if her legs had not turned to jelly in anticipation. Peter steps in slightly until his broad frame is all she can see, and then his lips are chapped but gentle against her own. It’s perfectly chaste, but it sends tingles down to her very toes and she can’t help a tiny gasp. Her heart feels like it could be singing and Ruth is overwhelmed by a feeling of perfect  _ rightness. _

It’s over too soon; Peter pulls back, his thumb rubbing idly over the curve of her hip. He looks rather nervous, and reality comes flooding back in to remind Ruth that she cannot, in fact, stand here for hours and be kissed - much though her heart is pushing that particular agenda. He looks to Alex, and she follows his gaze. He’s watching with guarded disbelief, poised to flee; Ruth thinks he might have done, but for her hand still wrapped around his arm and Peter, whose other hand grips his tightly.

Ruth screws up the rest of her courage - how much more damage can she do? - and presses up onto her toes. Alex doesn’t respond for a moment and Ruth almost pulls away, but then he shudders and suddenly kisses her back. The arm she clings to in order to balance on her toes moves to wrap around her, his hand settling at the small of her back and pull her closer as Alex pours into the kiss a thousand moments of hope and despair and time wasted. Ruth gives up on worry and fuss about polite society and clings to them both; this is absolutely, incandescently  _ right. _

Alex pulls back, breathing hard and staring in astonishment from Ruth to Peter. They’re standing in their little triangle, holding tightly to one another, but without any idea of what to say or do or-

“I love you,” Peter says quickly on a shaky breath, and his hand grips slightly tighter to her hip. “Both of you; I’m in love with you both, entirely. My whole life, I’ve never loved anything more. I’ve never been happier than here. I know it’s - wrong, but-”

Ruth is half-tempted to cheer when Alex steps forward and determinedly presses his lips to Peter’s, but Alex had brought her with him when he moved and she now finds herself caught in between them. Pleasant as it is to have her nose in the crook of Alex’s neck and her back pressed up against Peter’s broad chest, it is not conducive to good cheering. She does giggle, though, in breathless delight when Alex and Peter break apart and look equally surprised to have been kissing in the first place.

“You don’t mind,” Peter says rather incredulously. He looks almost as if he has been hit on the head and suddenly rendered able to see colour, and Ruth presses her fingers to her lips to hold in the bright laugh bubbling behind her teeth.

“Not as such, no,” Alex replies, just as breathlessly stunned. Ruth tips her head forward, resting her forehead on his collarbone and giggling quietly into his shirt. Peter squeezes her side gently and she can feel Alex’s grin where he presses it into her hair.

“Is something entertaining you, madam?” Peter says, feigning an imperious air.

Ruth tilts her head back until she can see them both again: their familiar, handsome faces that incite in her such tenderness and devotion, smiling down at her with nervous, tentative happiness. She would do anything for them.

She grins. “I am perfectly and tremendously happy, sir.”

Alex beams, the last of his nervousness melting away like snow in sunshine. Peter presses a kiss to her temple, stubble scratching not unpleasantly. “I am exceptionally glad to hear it.”

* * *

Nothing and everything changes overnight. Ruth had summoned all her self-control and put a stop to their exchange of sweet kisses when Alex had yawned massively into her collarbone, sending them all back to their own separate bedrooms but now holding hands, blushing lightly, grinning uncontrollably. Morning sees them going about their tasks as usual, but not before Peter nervously darts in to press kisses to both their cheeks and runs out into the cold, blushing. Alex laughs and treat Ruth to a rather less hasty one that leaves her toes curling, and she could rather get used to waking up this way. Everything feels a little different, now; a little brighter and better and more exciting.

They aren’t talking about it, though. Ruth thinks that, for now at least, this may be for the best; it’s all rather too new and frightening to discuss, and Ruth is half afraid that, like mist on the water, too much talk will blow it away. It can wait, anyway; they’ve plenty of time, just the three of them, to iron it all out.

Until, abruptly, they do not.

Because there is a young woman - a  _ lady, _ Ruth’s mind immediately corrects - standing at the gate with her neat little gloved hands folded before her in a spotless gown whose lace alone likely cost more money than Ruth could make in five years, a small case at her feet and a rather nervous expression on her pretty, elfin face.

“Can I help you?” Ruth hazards, halting abruptly halfway through taking the kitchen waste to the pigs. She resists the temptation to free a hand and smooth away a few errant strands of her own hair; the lady, of course, has thick and beautiful blonde hair that is immaculately coiffed.

“Thank you; I’m looking for Mr Langlands, but I fear I may have gone wrong…?” the lady says, looking about her at the farm uncertainly. Ruth tries desperately hard to remain calm and unwounded - what she knows about Alex’s family would make it rather unlikely that he end up where he is.

“Ruth, I’ve a mind to weed the market garden if you-” Alex looks up from his toolbox as he rounds the cottage and stops in his tracks. “Elsie,” he says in surprise, and the lady relaxes into a delighted smile. “Miss Bexleigh, rather - I did not expect you-?”

Miss Bexleigh colours a little as Alex steps closer. Ruth finds herself rooted to the spot as icy fingers run down her veins and cement her feet to the floor. “No; my apologies. You see, I’ve-” she leans in conspiratorially, “-run away. Just as you did.”

Ruth restrains a sceptical snort. Miss Bexleigh does not appear adequately attired for a repeat performance of Alex’s midnight flight out of a first floor window, and Ruth refuses to believe that anyone could realistically look quite so well put-together after an impromptu escape. Alex, too, had spent about a month afterwards discovering all the things he had forgotten at his aunt’s; Miss Bexleigh’s case is almost excessively neat.

Alex appears unbothered by these issues, turning immediately to concern. “Gosh - well, come inside; Ruth, could you make us some tea?”

Ruth offers them both a rather tight smile, suppressing the tumultuous mess of emotions roiling within her. “I’ll find Peter.”

* * *

Miss Elsie Bexleigh is, damn her, nice. She’s ever so terribly polite and dainty and interested, making all the appropriate little noises to encourage Alex in a conversation about the farm that she clearly does not understand, and then being perfectly proper in her discourse with Peter and Ruth. She’s civil but not familiar, formal but not aloof: in short, she is the very model of a modern charming socialite.

Ruth runs her eye surreptitiously over the girl’s perfect hair and neatly corseted waist and pale, smooth skin.  _ Gibson girls, eat your hearts out. Damn her, damn her, damn her. _

And she’s so perfectly likeable, and Alex is so perfectly kind and sweet and a gentleman, that when she explains, almost tearfully, that she’s nowhere else to go for she fears she’ll be cut off without a penny from her dear papa when he hears of her flight but she couldn’t  _ possibly _ remain in that house any longer; you know what it was like, Alex. Of course, she doesn’t mean to be rude: it was very kind of Lady Edwina to have her stay, only-

“Well, you must stay with us,” Alex exclaims.

“Oh, could I,” Elsie says, batting her eyelashes at Alex. “You are a saint, Alex - Mr Langlands, I should say.”

Alex waves a hand dismissively. “There’s no need for that here; we’re all friends, after all.”

It takes a rather serious amount of effort not to take that last comment too seriously; it does rather help to have Peter’s hand snake beneath the table and grip her own tightly.  _ Unless you and I have differing views of friendly behaviour, Alex, I should not say that all our friendships were made equally, _ Ruth thinks.

It makes her feel marginally better, and then immediately somewhat worse, to find that Elsie is, of course, quite useless. Peter has to move into Alex’s room to give her a place to sleep, and she’s not got the faintest idea how to strip a bed or replace the sheets. She’s never had to do anything more to a bedcover than lift it and slide beneath; Ruth, in contrast, has battered and beaten hands from laundry and lye. The woman could not survive on her own for more than a few hours, Ruth doesn’t doubt - but then, isn’t that rather the dream? The Gibson girl fantasy of an athletic, emancipated - but not  _ too _ emancipated - upper-middle-class lady who can simply sit and spin and look entirely glamorous all the while - is that not what is preferred? Miss Bexleigh is a doll and Ruth is a workhorse, and she knows which one she would rather have in her bed at night.

The worst of it is that Ruth cannot even really dislike the girl; she’s unfailingly polite and sweet and never says anything teasing or sharp or even especially intelligent, and it feels horribly cruel to think mean thoughts about her. It would be like putting one’s foot through a painting because it cannot deliver an essay on colour theory, and Alex would frown at her, wounded and disappointed, because he does not seem to understand, presently, that this  _ hurts. _

It hurts to find that Alex’s lady friend, whom the world would quite like him to marry, is beautiful and sweet and  _ in Ruth’s house, _ and it hurts to see Alex take time from his busy day to simply sit and talk to her, and it hurts, even, to see Peter duck and dart from the house when Elsie is there. It’s bleeding painful, deep in her chest, and were her work not centred about the hearth and home, where Alex and Elsie sit, she would have run away to bury her face in the shires’ manes too.

“Oh, Peter,” Ruth whispers as she steps into the gloom of the stables and runs her palm down his back.

He trembles under her touch, turning his face away from Tom’s neck to peer sorrowfully at her. “Sorry,” he says softly. “Is it supper already?”

“Yes, love,” she says, stepping a little closer and winding her arm around his back. He wraps his arm around her, pulling her flush against his side and pressing his nose into her hair. Tom stomps and huffs beside them, tired of the display, but they leave him be.

“I love you,” Peter mumbles against the crown of her head, into her comparatively flat and messy bun in its unfashionable colour. “I really do.”

“I love you too.” She presses the words into his chest, that they might quicker reach his heart. It hurts to see Peter hurting - it always has - but she hasn’t the faintest idea what to do about Elsie Bexleigh.

Peter presses a kiss to her parting and she tips her head back, chasing his lips until he ducks his head a little and kisses her properly. Some day, she thinks, they’ll do this in a place without half-light and hay, but for now she’ll take her stolen secret kisses.

His hands roam up her back and then settle on her hips to pull her closer to him, supporting her as she melts into his hold. Ruth goes all weak at the knees as he kisses her deeply, fervently, and her hands sneak up to the neck of his shirt without her input to press for more skin contact. She rather abruptly wants the whole shirt out of the way to better reach every part of Peter, but her standards require rather better than a stable floor for that sort of thing. The thought is rather hard to hang on to, though when Peter’s hands slide up to her waist, and then ribs, and if they could just go a  _ little _ higher-

“Supper will burn,” Peter mumbles against her skin, kissing the corner of her mouth, the line of her jaw, the column of her neck when she exposes it on a shuddering sigh.

“Let it,” she says, tangling her fingers in his hair and tugging so that she can kiss him properly again, until they’re both gasping and breathless. “Let Elsie Bexleigh sort it out.”

Peter chuckles softly, pressing their foreheads together and grinning. “You know she can’t.” Ruth offers him a smug smile, insides going all warm and golden when he treats her to a proper laugh. “Be a shame to let your cooking go to waste.”

She lets him have that one, his hunger wrapped up in a compliment and accompanied by another, final kiss that leaves her slightly unsteady on her feet. He walks her back to the cottage with her hand caught up in his; they both have working hands, complete with blisters and soreness and calluses, and there’s something quite comforting about it. Ruth is not a Gibson girl, but Peter hasn’t exactly fallen out of a Leyendecker painting either. He’s always made her feel that she is his equal, and that she means more to him as a capable person than as a beautiful doll. Besides, as a third son of a self-made man, he’s free of familial pressure - but even if he weren’t, Ruth is sure that Peter would know his own mind well enough to follow it and damn the consequences.

She’s not always so sure about Alex.

* * *

Ruth’s not had a new dress in an age, and she’s got the time and money just now, what with April bringing a little lull in the workings of the farm, and that’s why she wants to go to Plymouth and buy something pretty and a little special. It has nothing to do with Miss Bexleigh, thank you.

Peter raises an eyebrow at her when she announces her intent, and she resolutely ignores him.

“Fancy some company?” Alex says cheerily, already reaching for his coat.

There is a little wrongfooted pause in which everyone but Alex mentally adjusts what they had thought was going to happen into what, apparently, is. Ruth does fancy the company; she would adore it, in fact. A day out with Alex at the coast to look at pretty dresses and not fret about the farm or lunch or half a hundred other things sounds damn near perfect, but she - and Peter, by the looks of it - had supposed that Alex would stay here and mind their guest. Elsie herself looks rather put-out about it, and Ruth watches Peter swallow a rather triumphant grin at her disappointed little moue.

But if the man wants to come, then who is Ruth to stop him. “Have a lovely day,” Peter says with a smile. His mood seems to have improved dramatically at this one evidence of Alex favouring Ruth over Elsie, which in turn cheers Ruth up no end. “If the calf is born in your absence, I shall name it wisely.”

“She’s not ready yet,” Alex protests. They’ve this arrangement, the pair of them, that whoever finds or delivers the animal is allowed to christen it: in practise, this means that the as-yet genderless chicks are all called Alex Junior and most of the lambs have truly bizarre alphabetical names. Ruth’s lamb, having been resurrected in the small hours of Lady Day, is called Mary.

“Ah, that’s what you think,” Peter says, wagging his finger mysteriously and rather ridiculously, and Alex is still giggling as they step out into the finally-warm spring morning.

It’s nice to spend the day off the farm, for a change. Ruth wouldn’t give up her home and her life for the world: she adores the animals, and being out in nature, and feeling the weather on her face. But it can be a little isolated and insular, and it’s why she likes taking the boys to the pub every so often - just to see other faces and hear other voices. It’s nice, too, to spend the day with Alex from start to finish; they’re all so busy with one thing and another in different places at different times that it feels like she spends only half as much time with Alex and Peter as she’d like. Plymouth is familiar, but they’re not known there like they are in Morwellham where the three inexperienced enthusiasts are something of a curiosity, and she can loop her arm through Alex’s without a second thought to hold him close as she tugs him from one haberdashery to another, and then to a tailor, and then the fancy one on the High Street-

“Alright,” Alex says, “enough. Sit here, I’ll be right back.”

Ruth does smooth her skirts and sink onto the bench, but only because the view out over the sound here is really rather pretty and her feet are a little tired from walking up and down the streets all day -  _ not _ because she was told to. A seagull wheels overhead, cawing loudly, and the salt on the air is tangy on her tongue and makes her think of Peter now and his stories of his time at sea. It’s daft to miss him after only a few hours, but.

“Here.” Alex hands her an ice cream and sits beside her, stretching his long legs out before him. His arm rests on the back of the bench in an almost embrace and he tips his head back, eyes closed, into the sun as he eats his own ice cream so that he’s all sun-warmed and soft. He cracks one eye open to peer at her, and Ruth realises she’s not moved for too long, caught up in just looking, and blushes. He smiles and she busies herself with her cone and staring out to sea instead of becoming distracted again.

“Thank you,” she says, shifting back on the seat a little so that her shoulders just brush his arm.

“You’re welcome. Now, what’s all this about?” He turns slightly to level her with an assessing, no-nonsense look and Ruth can’t help but fidget a little and go back to her ice cream rather than meet his direct eyes.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she tells the cone firmly.

“This whole trip, Ruth. You’ve only been looking at high-end fabrics, and then you decided that you wanted the dress tailored, but you  _ like _ making your own clothes. You hunted Peter down before Christmas to get his waistcoat measurements just for something to do, and fussy buttons and lace irritate you because they’re so hard to wash. So - why are we here?”

He’s right. Whilst she’d rather he not be, there is something rather pleasing about his knowing her so well just by how much he listens to her gripes and grumbles and joys, and the effect is such that it’s too difficult to stick to her original intention of telling him nothing at all.

“Can’t I just be pretty, for a change?” she blurts out.

Alex looks rather taken aback. “But you are pretty,” he says, as if it should be obvious to her.

“No, I mean - I know I’m not very ladylike and dainty, like - some people are, and I thought-”

She breaks off as thunderclouds cross Alex’s brow. “Has Miss Bexleigh said something to you? Because if she has-”

Ruth reaches out and rests her hand on his forearm. “No! Not at all. Elsie is - almost too lovely.” Alex snorts in amused agreement at that, but he still looks rather cross. “I only thought that - well. Since she’s come all this way to see you,” she continues hesitantly, “that perhaps she rather likes you.”

Alex sighs, turning his frown upon the sea. “Yes, I rather think she does, though I imagine it’s only really because she has been thrust in my general direction and I wasn’t tremendously dismissive of every single thing she had to say - hang about.” He aims a half-smug half-smile in her direction and Ruth steels herself with a sigh. “Are you jealous?”

“Took you long enough to notice, Alex, honestly,” she mutters rather sullenly and Alex laughs in bright delight. “Peter is too!” she adds defensively, but this only makes him laugh harder.

His arm does move from the back of the bench to wrap around her properly, though, so there is that at least. “I never thought you would be,” he admits. Ruth occupies herself with finishing her ice cream so that her eye roll does not also become verbal. “Elsie is so tremendously - airy. She hasn’t any substance. You and Peter, you have such purpose and intelligence and practicality; far more than me. You’re absolutely invaluable and I wouldn’t change a single thing about you for a thousand Elsie Bexleighs. I adore you, Ruth; you and Peter. You need not be even slightly jealous - I’ve never even considered marrying her.” He has leaned in during this speech, earnest eyes holding her own and their hands, now joined, in her lap. Even if Ruth thought Alex capable of successfully lying to her, it is immediately apparent that he is telling her nothing but passionate honest truths.

She smiles, though her emotions are sufficiently surface-level that she might cry instead. “We’re not tremendously good at this courtship business, are we?” she says, and Alex chuckles and presses a gentle kiss to her forehead. “One thing after another. It wasn’t like this at all when I was first married.”

Alex’s thumb rubs her shoulder and she shifts a little closer into his side. “Why not?” he says softly.

His gaze is so intense, so beloved, that Ruth can barely breathe, let alone remember what answer she had intended to give. “I wasn’t quite this terribly in love with him,” she whispers instead, and Alex leans in and kisses her until she can feel her blood singing. They break apart for air and Ruth grins. “Well, and there was only one other person involved. Three times the foolishness is no simple matter.” Alex laughs and presses a kiss to her cheek, and then her temple, and then the corner of her mouth and Ruth has to push him away. It’s a fairly isolated spot, but there are other couples promenading about and it is still a public place, where they might be seen. “Alex, we can’t - not here.”

“Why not?” he says, his fingers stroking gently over her own. “Plenty of husbands take their wives out to the seafront for the day to eat ice cream and sit in the sun. No-one would think any the worse of us.”

“We aren’t married,” Ruth tries, but she can feel her resistance slipping. Alex is a terrible temptation, and she’s all too willing to believe that he’s right.

“No-one knows that. No-one knows us here. They won’t remember us.” He punctuates each statement with a kiss to her knuckles, and then the inside of her wrist, and then her cheek, until she cups a hand to his jaw and pulls him into a proper kiss. Her thumb smoothes over his cheek and he hums happily into her mouth, and Ruth can feel tiny tingles running down her back like the strings of lights that line the pier. “Well, they might remember us if you keep kissing me like that,” Alex says breathlessly, and Ruth giggles.

“Come on then.” His hands chase her, but she wriggles free to stand just out of reach. “I want to go home.”

“No new dress?” Alex says as he stands and tucks her hand into his elbow.

Ruth beams up at him and he smiles rather helplessly back. “None required.”

* * *

“Where’s this pretty new fabric, then?” Peter is leaning on the gate in the gloom, and may well have been for some time, unless he  _ just so happens _ to have been waiting there at the precise moment of their return.

“Ruth is quite pretty enough without,” Alex declares, and Ruth blushes deeply. Despite herself, a little fizzling shiver of excitement and nerves trembles down her spine and spreads over each and every part of her, skin tingling with the idea. “That is - I mean - I’m sure she-” Alex winces at his own words and strides forward to bury his hot face in Peter’s chest.

Peter’s arm comes up to wrap around Alex’s shoulders seemingly on instinct, as he directs a look of surprised delight at Ruth. “Well, Ruth is rather lovely,” he says, smiling as she rolls her eyes and blushes even harder. She does consent to cuddle in next to Alex when Peter opens his other arm to her. “A successful trip?”

Ruth hums up at him in pleased agreement. “I love you both very much,” Alex says as clearly as a man can with a faceful of cotton and solid muscle. “Did I not climb out of a window to live with you? I risked life and limb and spent several hours on a packed passenger train, there.”

Peter presses his grin into Alex’s hair, and breathes a huge sigh of relief. It had been hard to see how much tension he was carrying across his broad shoulders until it all suddenly relaxed out of him; Ruth thinks he looks vastly the better for it, and presses a kiss to the underside of his jaw to tell him so. “Well, so did Miss Bexleigh, apparently.”

“I remain unconvinced of that, in truth,” Ruth says, and Alex shifts his face out of Peter’s chest to smile at her.

“And quite possibly rightly so, dear Ruth. But sending her immediately back to Sussex seems a little cruel; if you don’t mind a few days more of secrecy, I should like to find a better place for her.”

If Alex weren’t so good and kind she wouldn’t love him so well. Much though she should like to have her boys all to herself again and not liable to be snapped up by some pretty little thing with money and status, she shall abide. “That would be very good of you,” Ruth says with perfect equanimity.

“But Ruth would like it to be as soon as possible, please and thank you,” Peter laughs, squeezing her waist fondly as she makes a face about being caught out.

“Well, really! She’s extra work and no help and annoyingly charming,” Ruth says, folding her arms. But Alex laughs and kisses her, and Peter buries his face in her hair and holds her close to him, and Ruth feels rather a lot better for it all anyway.

* * *

_ A few days _ turns all too quickly into  _ the rest of the month - I am sorry Ruth, truly, only- _

“Yes, yes, I know,” she says, waving off his apologies. Alex is a rather poor correspondent at the best of times, and having left the social influence of his aunt has found his contacts sorely lacking. What is more, these contacts are largely through the circles that Alex - and to a lesser extent, Elsie - is trying to avoid; transferring her to someone else’s Aunt Edwina would achieve very little indeed.

Alex looks furtively about him and wraps his arms about her waist from behind, pressing a kiss to the corner of her jaw.  _ You’re not half as sorry as I am, _ Ruth thinks, biting her lip when his hands trail slowly over her stomach and hips as he pulls away, and that isn’t entirely fair, only-

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to limit herself to just the occasional kiss, to restrain her hands from wandering, to keep her thoughts on good and God-fearing lines. She’s developed the unfortunate tendency to imagine hands in her hair and skating over hot, sweaty skin; bare, lean bodies curling around her; mouths on - and  _ damn it, _ she was supposed to be stirring that and now dinner’s caught a little at the edges and her face is on  _ fire. _ She’s not exactly prudish, but she is aware that this is not behaviour becoming of a fully grown woman, and there’s also not terribly much to be done about it, now. Even if Ruth could imagine broaching this conversation with Alex and Peter -  _ hello, chaps; I’m finding it tremendously distracting that I’ve not had you both in my bed yet. Could you rectify that, please? _ \- Alex has made it abundantly clear that Elsie Bexleigh’s presence is something of a cold shower in the amorous department. There is a tension about him whenever one of them so much as embraces him if Miss Bexleigh could be around the corner, and Ruth does understand, even if it gives her another reason to want Elsie happily situated elsewhere as soon as possible. If she reports back to Alex’s aunt, things could get distinctly ugly for them all.

“How’s the cream coming along?” Alex asks, adequately distracting her from thoughts that make her brow furrow.

Ruth peers at the thick yellow layer covering the milk in the pan. “I think that means it’s done. I hope it does. I’ve not made it before.”

“It looks good,” Peter says as he wanders in, dropping a casual kiss to her hair and squeezing Alex’s shoulder. “I am sure I shall very much enjoy eating it.”

“We’re supposed to be selling it,” Alex says, grinning up at Peter with such open adoration that Ruth has to stop for a minute and just look. “You can’t eat our product.”

Peter makes a face, rubbing small, fond circles into Alex’s shoulder with his thumb. “I’ll just test it. You know, to make sure it’s edible.”

“You’re incorrigible,” Alex informs him.

Peter leans in a little. “You love it,” he says quietly.

Alex shrugs, trying not to smile. “Alright,” he replies, just as soft. “But I’m sure the cream will all be perfectly lovely, because Ruth is an excellent cook.”

“Well, I am rather new at this,” she hedges, moving the pan off the heat.

“Which makes it only more impressive,” Peter points out. He catches her hand as she passes, pulling her a little closer to them and looking promisingly inclined to dip his head - and then Elsie enters, yawning delicately into her glove, and they jump apart to occupy themselves with other things.

“Good morning,” Elsie says sweetly, and Ruth smiles a greeting. The three of them have been up for hours already, but Elsie never rises much before breakfast - she hasn’t the chores that might force her up earlier, but it still irritates Ruth a little.

“Morning. What’s today’s job, Alex?” Peter says, reaching over and around Ruth to collect crockery and lay the table. It allows him to gently brush up against her or momentarily trap her with his arms against the sideboard and she entertains herself with thoughts of how, when they’re all finally alone together, she’ll turn in his arms and let him pin her against the wall with broad hands and seeking kisses until Alex joins in or laughingly demands breakfast with a voice full of love.

It’s a distracting thought and she shakes her head slightly to clear it before joining the others at the table. “Weeding the potatoes,” Alex says, pouring her a cup of tea. “I think it might well take all day, although I’d really like to get that net mended for Mr Samson - the fish he gave us in exchange was lovely.”

“Oh, Elsie and I can do that,” Ruth says. She’s not got too much work to get on with today, and in truth she’d dearly like to see Miss Bexleigh do something useful for a change.

Elsie looks rather alarmed. “I do not - could I? I do not know how.”

“You can sew, can’t you?” Ruth says. It’s a rhetorical, no-nonsense question: of course she can, with her education, and even Alex could manage to mend a net.

“Well, I suppose I could try, but my bouillon rosettes have never been terribly good and my sewing tutor always said that the less said about my french knots, the better,” Elsie says with some genuine embarrassment - as if the boys might know what any of that meant, or as if Ruth had ever had a sewing tutor to make similarly snide comments. It genuinely does seem to rather bother her, though, and Ruth is beginning to wonder whether the world has ever had many good words to say about a kind but rather dim girl like Elsie Bexleigh.

Ruth offers her an encouraging smile. “You’ll do just fine.”

It’s a gloriously sunny day, so she drags Elsie, the net and two chairs out to the top of the potato field to sew in the sunshine and watch the boys at work. Having shown Elsie that it really is only an altered form of running stitch and tying knots, the ladies sit quietly and listen to the birdsong as they watch Alex, Peter and Prince make their way up and down the field.

Out of nowhere, Elsie speaks. “Is this what you expected your life to be like?”

Ruth snorts. “Not at all. I used to be married to a steelworker in Cardiff; I never thought I’d end up on a farm in Devon, sitting in the sun and breathing in clear, clean air.”

“Oh.” Elsie fiddles with her needle for a minute, clearly thinking something over. “I - My condolences. About your husband.”

“Thank you. But-” she stops. It has been a long time since she was anything but Mrs Goodman, widow, and it’s harder every day to bring the details of her husband to mind. She remembers his face and his voice, but the exact things he used to say are slipping further and further from her mind. They’d been barely grown when they married, having known each other since they were small, and not much older when he’d caught a vicious strand of ‘flu and sent her to her mother’s to keep her from catching it. She more vividly remembers being not yet twenty-one and staring at a life once shared, packed into crates with nowhere to go, but his last words to her are lost forever. “He was a good man, and I did love him. I think, perhaps, that - if things had been different - we would not have married at all. We were friends and he was good to me, but I’m happier here. If our families hadn’t pushed so hard for our marriage I dare say we’d never have courted in the first place.” Peter and Alex, at the far end of the field, have stopped Prince and are now squinting up at the rows of plants and debating what to do. She can’t hear them well enough to know what about, but Alex is leaning enough into Peter’s side that they are subtly brushing against each other and their heads are bent together in conversation. Her heart settles in her chest, warmth radiating out, and tells her in no uncertain terms that this is exactly and precisely where she would most like to be, thank you very much. “He wanted me to be happy, and I am.”

There’s another pause as Elsie digests Ruth’s words and Alex and Peter make their way back towards them. Alex offers them a smile; Peter hauls his woollen jumper off and flings it at Ruth’s feet. “It’s hot,” he says, rolling up his shirtsleeves.

“All that hard work you’re doing,” Ruth says, shading her eyes to look up at them. No, she really can’t miss her old life at all.

“Well, someone’s got to provide for you, if you’re just going to sit about in the sun all day,” Alex says, leaning on Prince’s shoulder and grinning.

Ruth moves her hand and closes her eyes, smiling smugly. “It is rather glorious, isn’t it. Chop chop, then; I want a life of idle luxury as soon as possible.”

She cracks her eyes open in time to see Alex roll his eyes in fond amusement and Peter duck his head, laughing as he turns Prince around to weed the next furrow.

“Alex is never going to marry me, is he,” Elsie says abruptly once the boys are about halfway down the field. Ruth turns to look at her, but Elsie looks resolutely ahead, and Ruth knows that look; knows that terrible terror of being alone in a world that desperately wants you to be dependent when you have no-one upon whom to depend.

“No,” she says gently. There are times when it is kinder to lie, but this is not one of them.

Elsie nods sharply, blinking hard. “Well. I suppose I shall find somewhere else to go, then.”

“Alex has been looking for a place for you,” Ruth says.

“That’s kind of him.” There’s a hard, brittle edge to her voice that Ruth has never heard before, and she feels rather terrible about every bad thing she has ever thought about the girl.

Ruth sighs, looking over the field and trying desperately to think of a way Elsie could be half as happy as Ruth is here. “Yes, it is.”

“I just thought-” Elsie looks down at the net in her lap, attacking it with sudden energy. “He doesn’t seem to dislike me so much as many of papa’s acquaintances. I know everyone thinks I’m silly, but I can tell when people dislike me.” Ruth feels horribly guilty all over again, almost sick to her stomach with it. She has tried not to be unkind, but she has hardly been as good as she might be, either. “I don’t want to get married, really, but I thought - if we could be friends at least, like you and your late husband, then perhaps it wouldn’t be so very bad?”

Elsie looks up under her lashes at Ruth, and Ruth becomes abruptly very determined and more protective than she had previously thought it possible for such a girl to inspire. She reaches out and takes Elsie’s hand in hers. “But you should have better.  _ Not so very bad _ could be worse, certainly, but you mustn’t marry because you’re afraid. Do what you really, truly want to do, not what your family says you ought.”

Elsie looks rather alarmingly close to tears, but she smiles through it. “I don’t know what I want to do,” she says, laughing a little wetly. “I was happy at school, but I don’t suppose I could go back.”

“Any beloved school chums with children?” Ruth says, turning back to the net to give the girl a moment to compose herself. When she nods, Ruth is decided. “Write and inquire if they have need of a governess. I dare say the friend will be glad of the help and the company, and you can avoid the worst of the familial pressure through gainful employment.”

Elsie is quiet for a long moment, long enough that Ruth sends her a glance in some concern. But she is simply gazing into the distance, with a small smile on her face and an air, at last, of hope. “Thank you, Ruth,” she says. “I do believe I shall.”

* * *

They try very hard to be patient, but waiting in the kitchen quickly becomes by the gate, and then a little way down the lane to see better, and then Peter tucks her hand into his elbow and they are meandering between the apple trees towards the jetty. When the wind blows, tiny round petals drift earthward in a snow-white shower, crowning Peter’s curls like wedding confetti.

“So, are we likely to spend the summer misunderstanding each other too, or do you think we’ve passed that stage?”

Ruth laughs. “Oh, I imagine we have many years of misunderstandings ahead of us.”

Peter beams down at her, squeezing her hand. “Well, that’s alright, then. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I understood the pair of you all the time, but it’s nice to know I’ve a good long time to figure it out.”

He does look rather delighted about the idea and Ruth presses closer into his side, propping her chin on his arm to smile back at him. Spending the rest of her life here, in sunshine and apple blossom and cloud and snow, sounds rather lovely if she can have Alex and Peter to share it with.

Speaking of - there are footsteps, rapid and pounding, ahead of them and Ruth pulls away to turn her grin on Alex, charging up the aisle of trees with one hand clamping his hat to his head. Peter steps forward as if he cannot quite help himself, opens his mouth to say something, and is therefore taken entirely by surprise when Alex wraps his arms about him and manages a rather impressive dip to accompany his kiss.

Alex looks a little embarrassed when Ruth cheers, laughing, but Peter - around his astonishment - seems to rather...enjoy the event. “I take it Miss Bexleigh is safely aboard her train,” he manages rather breathlessly.

“Yes,” Alex says, letting him back up and smoothing out his jacket rather bashfully. “She’s off to East Anglia to be a governess, and we have the farm to ourselves. Everyone is where they are supposed to be.”

Ruth reaches out and catches a blossom out of the air, rubbing the thin waxy petal between her fingers. She has a home, and a future, and people who love her; she can hear birdsong on the breeze and smell summer approaching. The blue skies above her promise a day of good weather, and Alex and Peter before her promise years of affection and care.  _ Everyone is where they are supposed to be _ \- Ruth thinks Alex might be right, there.

“Well,” Peter says with a mischievous grin. He and Alex reach out to her, taking up her hands gently and tugging her, smiling, into their embrace. “Ruth could be standing a little closer.”


	4. Misummer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When we die—we'll think of Devon  
> Where the garden's all aglow  
> With the flowers that stray across the grey old wall:  
> Then we'll climb it, out of heaven,  
> From the other side, you know,  
> Straggle over it from heaven  
> With the apple-blossom snow,  
> Tumble back again to Devon  
> Laugh and love as long ago,  
> Where there isn't any fiery sword at all.  
> \- Alfred Noyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i love leyendecker; for this chapter, i would recommend 'portrait of two men' and 'lovebirds'.

Whey drips slowly and rhythmically into a bowl, the notes oddly musical in the quiet of the morning. Ruth scoops the curd carefully into the presses, biting her lip slightly as she concentrates, and Alex sits very still and watches Peter watch Ruth. Peter’s gaze remains focussed on her face, just looking, but with an underlying steady intensity as though he is attempting to fix every detail in his mind. Alex, for his part, is desperately remembering the way the rain sounds on the windows, the way escaped strands of hair rest against Ruth’s pale neck, the way Peter leans slightly forward in his chair to place himself that little bit nearer her.

Ruth shoots Alex an amused look under her lashes. “It’s like sitting with taxidermies, the pair of you,” she says, quiet in the peace of the morning but warmly enough that Peter and Alex are unrepentant about continuing to sit quietly, eyes tracking her as she moves about the kitchen to finish her cheeses. “Well,” she says at last, standing back with her hands on her hips to look assessingly at her produce. “Some of that ought to be alright for you to take with you, when you go.”

Despite having thought of little else all morning, Alex likes the reminder about as much as Peter seems to; Peter catches her hand and tugs gently, looking up imploringly at Ruth. She steps closer willingly, but with an air of slight reluctance. They all see where this conversation is going: it’s one they have had before, and no-one is keen on the position Ruth is forced to take up, least of all Ruth herself.

“Come with us,” Peter says anyway, his thumb rubbing over the back of her hand. With Ruth standing before him, her hand so small and delicate in his, and Peter’s face turned up in supplication, the scene before Alex could be Biblical or Classical or some chivalric ideal, if only Ruth ever needed rescuing.

“Peter,” Ruth sighs, and Alex almost wishes Peter wouldn’t ask. Much though he longs for Ruth to change her stance, she cannot; every reminder hurts them all. “You know I have to stay. Who will look after the farm?” she asks of his unchanging expression.

“Mr Mudge.” Alex frowns in some confusion. Ruth blinks, looks to Alex, sees that he, too, doesn’t know what Peter means, and turns back to him with one eyebrow raised. “And his grandchildren, and some of their schoolmates.”

“Why, dear heart, would Mr Mudge and a small herd of children run our farm for a month?” Ruth says with some hesitation.

“Why would we let them?” Alex adds. The idea of handing over every material thing he values in the world to an old man and a collection of eleven-year-olds fills him - not unreasonably - with some trepidation.

“Because Mr Mudge is very experienced, but will soon be retiring. He should like to train the youngsters before he is too old to do so, and requires space that his own farm cannot offer to do so. In exchange for a month looking after our animals and spraying the potatoes, his sons will help us shear our sheep.” Peter looks at Alex, who is trying very hard not to be immediately won over. “We trust Mr Mudge,” he reminds them softly. “And, this way, Ruth could come with us to Dartmoor.”

Alex is immediately won over.

Ruth is thinking it over from every angle, and Alex loves her for it - at present, he only wants all three of them together in his uncle’s old cottage on the moor, with nothing but sheep and heather for miles, but Ruth will not let them do something stupid for a month of peace. She wants to say yes, though. Alex can see it in the way she leans into Peter’s space, pressing their knees together and bowing her head to look him in the eyes.

“Come with us,” Peter says again, one hand shifting to her hip. Ruth lets her hand fall to his shoulder, swaying into the space between his knees and biting her lip thoughtfully. The air is suddenly somehow heavy with quiet and tension, and Alex can feel his heart beating too-loudly in his chest. “Where there is nobody around for miles,” Peter continues in a low voice. His hand slides down the outside of Ruth’s thigh and then back up, catching a little of her skirts and pushing them up slightly, and Alex forgets, for a moment, to breathe.

He would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about - this; in truth, it has been far more difficult than he would like to admit _not_ to think about it. Alex is quite content to blame Peter and Ruth for at least some of this: if they will insist on kissing him until his head spins, or standing near-glowing in the sunlight, or fitting so tremendously nicely in his arms, then. Well. But he’s not quite sure he’s ready for them to know how much the thinks about - all of that. Ruth is a lady, after all; he should hate to make unwanted advances. And whilst he’s trying desperately not to think about what the world at large and his Aunt Edwina specifically would think of his living arrangements, one thought too many about what Peter might look or feel or sound like, laid out bare under Alex’s palms, still tends to send him stumbling through a shaky prayer for forgiveness in the small hours of the morning. So, much though the isolation of Dartmoor does appeal to Alex for _those_ reasons, he would not be quite so brave as to say it out loud.

“We can be quite alone together,” Peter says, eyes locked on Ruth’s and hand moving slowly up and down the outside of her thigh. Alex is rather impressed; he would have collapsed, jelly-legged into Peter’s lap by this point, were he Ruth, and were he Peter he would not have begun upon this line of persuasion. Every book he has ever read and every scrap of knowledge in this area he has managed to accumulate would have him believe that the fairer sex has limited interest in the matter, but even from this distance, Alex can see Ruth’s pupils are blown wide and dark. Her breathing seems more careful, as if she is thinking rather hard about how to breathe normally in the face of such persuasion; Alex has resorted to merely trying to keep his hitching breaths quiet. “No-one at all to disturb us,” Peter promises, pressing a kiss to Ruth’s hand.

Ruth looks at Alex and makes a decision based on the expression he can’t keep off his face. She moves her hand from Peter’s shoulder to his jaw and swoops quickly in to kiss him, deep and seeking and urgent, and then stands straight again. Alex’s brain stumbles to recover from the sight as Ruth steps neatly out of Peter’s reach and away from his chasing fingers. “Fine. I will go with you to Dartmoor. You have persuaded me by being highly inappropriate for the middle of the morning with the kitchen door _entirely open_ , Peter, when you _know_ people could come to the farm because it was most of your argument. You bastard,” she says, entirely too fast and without much real anger, fanning her very hot and flushed face with both hands as she turns away from them both.

Peter laughs in delighted triumph, eyes dancing with mischief in a way that does not, exactly, help Alex return to his usual state of equilibrium. He leans on the table, propping his head in his palm, and winks at Alex. “What do you think, Alex? I have allowed Ruth to come to Dartmoor with us, thus solving all our problems: am I a bastard, or a genius?”

In an effort to silence any response he might have made to the scene before him, Alex appears to have swallowed his own tongue and fused his jaw shut. It therefore takes a moment to persuade his mouth to work again. “You’re a bastard,” he manages through rather strangled vocal chords.

He can’t help but grin, though, when Peter and Ruth laugh. Ruth maintains a rather impressive blush about it all, but Peter just reaches over the table to take and kiss Alex’s hand - until Ruth flicks some cold water at him from the bucket by the sink and he flinches away. “Don’t you start again,” Ruth says sternly around a smile, and Peter looks duly and rather fraudulently apologetic. “Go and tell Mr Mudge what we’ve decided, will you?” she says, when it becomes apparent that Peter is quite willing to remain here just holding Alex’s hand, and that Alex is not much inclined to move him.

Alex’s hand is given one last squeeze, and then Peter is grinning off into the rain, whistling brightly as he trots through the puddles towards the Mudge farm. Ruth sends a fond look after him and then turns it on Alex. He can’t quite believe his luck for a moment - did the last conversation really happen to him? - and so when he opens his mouth to say something like _I’ll go and find the potato sprayer_ what comes out is “Do you really want - that?”

Ruth tilts her head as she looks at him. “To go to Dartmoor, or to be very alone together and finish that which Peter was good enough to start?” Alex struggles to manage an answer for a moment, until Ruth tilts her head thoughtfully. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, actually,” she continues. “The answer is yes. Very much, if I am honest. Do you?”

Alex nods fervently, comforted by her confidence, and Ruth smiles - which comforts him yet further. “But not here, yet,” he adds rather quietly.

Ruth rounds the table to lean against it and run a hand over his hair and down his hot cheek. He pushes into the contact, brushing a light kiss to the heel of her palm but shooting a faintly nervous look at the still-open door as he does so. “Not here yet,” she agrees easily. “And we’ve plenty of time alone together; we can take all the time you need.”

“I was thinking of you, actually,” Alex mumbles into her hand before he can stop himself.

Ruth laughs softly and kisses him properly, until his blood thrums and he feels boneless in her hands. The caring confidence with which Ruth thumbs at the hinge of his jaw until his mouth falls open to her, the sweetness and ease with which she has him gasping against her tongue, the smug smile she treats him to when she pulls back, leaving him stunned and short of breath - she needn’t really say that she is ready whenever he is, but she does anyway.

Alex loves her for it.

* * *

The sun is low over the moor, setting the evening in amber and holding Alex in the moment like an insect in translucent golden resin. The air smells of hot dust and peat smoke when Alex tilts his head back to open up his chest and breathe deep and slow of the warm evening air, leaning back on palmfuls of spongy moss and prickling springy heather with his long legs sprawled out before him. There are midges on the breeze and grasshoppers scratching in the dirt around him, noisy in the quiet of the evening, but the air is warm and there is a fire crackling beside him and, most important of all, Ruth frowning as she prods the peat fire thoughtfully and Peter watching over them with a hand shading his eyes as he gazes over the valley.

Alex closes his eyes to feel the warmth on his eyelids, head dropping back to rest on Peter’s knee. He doesn’t, in truth, know how to _be,_ in this moment. He hasn’t the experience others enjoy of courtship; he’d liked a chap in boarding school - and only realised many years after leaving - and had dealt with that by punching him in the arm a few times and running away from even the most normal of conversations. These are not strategies he thinks Peter and Ruth would much enjoy. But Alex can’t help overthinking every little thing; is he touching too much? Not enough? Is he going too slowly, or at the right speed? He hasn’t the point of reference he needs, no touchstone of knowledge upon which to rely, and any waymarkers society might offer seem not to apply, exactly. Being an unconventional romantic group, Alex is rather unsure of the milestones he ought to wait for, or even expect: it has been made rather clear, after all, that this excursion to Dartmoor could well be when they stop _waiting until marriage_ \- a concept that fills Alex with equal parts terror and excitement - but the topic of marriage itself has been rather ignored. Which Alex doesn’t mind so very much, but it is leaving him somewhat anchorless in a sea of feelings which he has only ever been told to expect with one female fiancée.

Peter runs a hand over his hair, thumb brushing away the slight frown that had been forming. “Alright?” he murmurs, and Alex hums.

“Thinking too much,” he says, eyes still closed, and it’s true. He is alone with the people he loves the most, who are exceptionally easy to just _be_ around if Alex could just stop trying, and he is miles from anyone who might give the slightest damn about what they get up to. If his brain could just calm down, he might have a much better time of it all.

“About?” Ruth inquires. He opens his eyes to check, but as expected she’s deliberately keeping her eyes down, stirring their dinner and giving him space to respond as he will.

“Us,” he says, and that does make her eyes flick worriedly to his face for a second. “I’ve never loved anyone like I love you two,” and even just saying that out loud in a more-or-less public place sends a thrill of newness down his spine, “and I’m not sure I quite know how to do it.”

Peter tangles his fingers in Alex’s hair - it needs cutting, if Peter can get a whole handful of his half-hearted curls at the front - and strokes his brow. “Well, you’re doing rather splendidly so far,” he says, and Alex tips his head up to see him smiling down. The genuine warmth in the gaze makes Alex rather want to kiss him, only he’s too far away; Alex settles for winding his arm around Peter’s other leg and gently rubbing his thigh with his thumb.

“You mustn’t worry so, love,” Ruth says gently, serving their dinner. The smell makes his mouth water and he leans in, still half wrapped around Peter’s leg. “Do as you feel. Stop thinking about what other people might think or say or do; Peter and I aren’t in love with _other people_.”

“I know,” Alex says, offering Ruth a smile in payment for his plate and reluctantly letting Peter go so that he can drop down onto the heather between them.

“Then that’s all we’ll ask of you,” Peter says, reaching out to fondly shove Alex’s shoulder before tucking into his food. Alex hides a smile in his food; he and Peter apparently went to the same boarding school of showing male affection.

“Sheep all settled, then?” Ruth says after a pause filled by enthusiastic eating and the popping and crackling of the fire.

“More or less,” Peter says around a mouthful. Ruth raises an eyebrow, and he clarifies. “Yes, but we’ll _definitely_ have to stay to the end of the month. Just in case.”

“Oh, I see,” Ruth says archly, trying not to laugh and not quite succeeding. “Well, it’s quite the sacrifice, but I’m sure we shall manage,” she says, waving her fork at the the sunset and the standing stones and the tranquil isolation.

“That’s very good of you,” Peter says, sending Alex an amused smile, and it’s exceedingly tempting to lean into Peter’s side and eat pressed against his broad warmth, so - he does.

Peter gives him a surprised little smile, looking more pleased than he could likely say, and Alex blushes lightly at Ruth’s knowing amusement. He would have spent more time leaning into Peter if he had known it would make him half so happy, especially since his heart seems to while away the hours these days just longing to be touching one or other or both of them and this is far more fun than the occasional punch to the arm.

It is, however, also far more difficult not to respond to the contact, and Ruth’s fairly wicked grin isn’t much helping.

Alex leaves his cleared plate on the grass and shifts to lie down with his head on Peter’s thigh. The world, all the same but turned askew, feels different from here. It’s Midsummer night, the sun low in the sky but still shining on, and there’s magic in the air. Their picnic lines up with the straight rows of stone running on and on across the moor, chasing after the sun, and the heat held in the heather beneath him seems to hold some kind of thrumming energy. These stones were placed here for this moment, and a thousand moments like it; for him, and a thousand people like him. It’s nice to think that he isn’t alone, that others have been here before him and had his worries and stood in his spot. Alex has been here before, because others have, and - actually, Alex _has_ been here before.

He frowns, suddenly remembering: barely twice the height of the stones himself, he had run up and down the length of the road and stumbled on the uneven ground and compared the length of his shadow with an older, taller gentleman. The man had had a warm voice, as if always entertained by the lad’s antics, and Alex remembers that better than he does the man’s face. It had been a marked contrast upon his relocation to Sussex.

“My uncle took me here, once,” he realises. “When I was a boy. I had forgotten.”

“I thought you never really knew him,” Peter says, running his fingers through Alex’s hair.

Alex shrugs one shoulder. “I didn’t. But I was here, at Midsummer, when I was little more than five or six. He told me about the druids and celts and magic, and showed me the stones.” Alex remembers reaching out to trace chubby little fingers over something older than he could truly comprehend, listening to stories of people who lived longer ago even than the little boy’s grandfather - which is old indeed, when one is five or six. He had been fascinated, of course, and a voracious reader ever since; searching for traces of a hand older than his own in his books and buildings and even the earth around him.

“Do you remember why you came?” Ruth asks, and Alex winces. At least the memory of his stay isn’t painful; the boy hadn’t yet realised that this little holiday was only the beginning of a life lived with aunts and uncles. It does hurt now, however.

“Aunt Edwina hadn’t yet snatched me away to live with her,” Alex says. Peter’s hand moves to squeeze his shoulder quickly, and Ruth says “ah,” ever so quietly. “I think I should have liked it better here. He seemed to like children.”

And he had tried to keep Alex with him; Alex vaguely remembers a stand-off in the cottage’s little kitchen between Uncle John and his sister-in-law, chalk and cheese from the tip of Edwina’s fine hat to the soles of John’s scuffed boots. Uncle John had stood his ground as long as he could, but then there had been a comment made about “men like you” and Alex’s uncle had recoiled as if stung, and Edwina had smiled like a shark, and that had been that. Alex did not see John Leslie Lawrence again.

“I think I wish you had lived here,” Peter says. “I hate to think of your childhood, and I’m now just as upset about your bachelor uncle alone all that time, too.”

Something about the way Peter says _bachelor_ makes Alex frown and shift to look up at him. “You don’t think - he was a _confirmed bachelor,_ do you?”

“I don’t know,” Peter says quickly. “Only - he never married, and I really couldn’t say why your aunt didn’t like him or why he spent so much time up on the moor, but-”

“I think,” Alex begins, cutting off Peter’s rambling and then trailing off himself. “Perhaps. I should like to think that at least one of my relatives wouldn’t mind my actions.”

Another hand settles on his head - Ruth’s, by the slight chill and thin fingers. “We aren’t doing anything wrong,” she reminds him a little sharply.

“I know. And I’d like to think that Uncle John knows so too.” There is a pause after he speaks, and eventually he contorts his neck to look at Ruth. She smiles at him - with such softness that Alex cannot help but feel that his heart is literally melting in his chest - and leans over to kiss his forehead. His eyes flutter shut and he falls into a smile, the corner of which Peter traces with the very tip of his index finger, as if he’s trying to remember the shape.

The sun slips below the horizon in a last dying blaze of glorious red and orange and purple, taking with it the very last of the warmth. With the wind on the moor, the temperature drops rapidly even right beside the fire, and Alex knows he hasn’t long to wait before a sudden and terrible shiver ripples through Ruth’s slight frame.

Sure enough, there is a colossal shudder from their companion and Alex and Peter start to move, resigned to their return to the cottage. “No,” Ruth protests. “It’s fine. We don’t have to go back yet.”

Alex stays sat up, sure that they’ll have to go back after all, but Peter just opens his arms. “Come on, then. Can’t have anyone getting cold.”

Alex shrugs at Ruth’s look of bemusement, and this seems to be impetus enough; she shifts, clambering into Peter’s lap, and smiles as his arms settle about her. Alex flops back down, head now pillowed in her skirts, and grins up at them both. Peter’s smile is half-pressed into Ruth’s hair, but broad enough to be easily seen. From here, Alex has a rather excellent view; when Ruth turns her head to see and then kiss Peter’s grin, Alex can watch every movement that turns it from a chaste press of lips into something quite different. He can see the way that Peter chases every inch of contact, he can see when Ruth licks into Peter’s mouth, he can see Ruth’s hand come up to cup Peter’s jaw and Peter’s shift on her waist and both their spare hands drop as one to Alex’s own chest to catch up his hands in theirs.

Alex presses their knuckles to his lips. His skin is thrumming with nervous energy, all anticipation and fear, and he wants more and less and everything all at once. Peter’s thumb rubs across his wrist in time with a movement against Ruth’s lips and Alex shudders, head to toe. It’s terrifying and electrifying at the same time, and Alex can barely breathe for how much he wants it.

Peter and Ruth break apart, breathing heavily as they look down at him. “Cold?” Peter says.

“We can go back,” Ruth says, squeezing his hands.

Alex is fairly sure that, were it not for the night breeze, his face would be quite literally aflame. “It isn’t that,” he says quietly.

Peter hums, thoughtful and a little surprised. “Well, we can still go back,” Ruth says quite slowly, voice low and warm but perhaps slightly nervous, too.

“I wouldn’t mind that,” Peter says, as calmly as he can manage.

Ruth snorts, giving him an _oh, really_ look. “Wouldn’t mind,” she scoffs quietly over Alex’s surprised giggling. Peter rubs the back of his neck, grinning rather sheepishly. “I’m sure.”

They are giving him the choice, and Alex quite possibly likes that the best of all, better than the kissing and the view and the wild, wonderful moor. That makes it easier to smile up at Peter and Ruth, and squash his nerves, and say, “I shouldn’t much mind it either.”

* * *

There’s a tension in the air as they pack up and walk home. Alex seems able to feel threads linking him to Peter and Ruth, aware at every turn of their exact location and drawn to them with every movement. But they’re practical people, so Peter and Ruth wash up their picnic and Alex sits at the table to trim the wicks of their lamps and he doesn’t kiss them hungrily the second that the door closes behind him. He can be a patient, practical person, and if they’re to have any light this evening the wicks will have to be trimmed - and he wants light this evening, enough to see the reality of the smooth skin and bared limbs that have haunted his dreams since the midwinter equinox.

Peter reaches around Ruth, making little to no effort to leave enough space and subsequently brushing his arm down the entire length of her back and a little beyond. In revenge, she presses the side of their hips together, in contact from her shoulder to her knee, and smiles sweetly up at Peter. With every reminder of what is to come, a little of Alex’s nerves melts away to be replaced with pure anticipation and he has to occupy himself entirely with the lamp in his hands lest he become entirely distracted and quite useless.

In consequence, he doesn’t realise Ruth and Peter have finished their task until Ruth taps his shoulder gently. “Sit back, my love,” she says and Alex, quite happy to do as instructed even without the slightest idea what for, pushes back from the table to look up at her. For this reason, he hasn’t the time to be nervous before Ruth is collecting up her skirts and swinging one leg over his knees. Instinctively his hands fall to her waist, supporting and holding her close as she settles astride his lap, her hands on his shoulders, and Alex can barely seem to breathe as she leans in to kiss him.

It’s all both familiar and new. Alex has lost count of the kisses he has given and received, but Ruth’s never been slightly above him before and she seems to like the new angle, judging by the way she leans into him, pressing up and forward and kissing him fervently. Ruth’s hips shift in his lap and that’s new, too, and of definite interest; with her hands and her hips pinning him to the chair Alex feels surrounded, almost lost in her, and it’s a great deal easier to get out of his own head and stop thinking when he is entirely reduced to the points at which he is in contact with Ruth.

There is a loud and shaky exhale from the direction of the sink and Ruth pulls back enough to shoot a wicked grin at Peter. His hands are all twisted up in the dishcloth, eyes fixed firmly on the pair of them, and apparently as unable to move as a tree rooted firmly to the flagstones. Alex himself cannot seem to manage much more response than breathless wonder, especially when Ruth begins to teasingly press her lips to his jawline, her eyes on Peter.

Alex sighs himself when her fingers slide over the skin of his neck, head tipping back to give her better access, and he can see Peter’s bright eyes tracking every single movement greedily. His breath hitches slightly whenever Alex responds to Ruth’s slow, steady progression along the line of his jaw and down his neck, and this is impetus enough to encourage Alex. The idea of perhaps inciting such a response from Ruth and this then pleasing Peter - performing, almost - holds a curious illicit appeal for Alex, and according to his new plan he moves, aiming for access to Ruth’s neck - and managing to bump their heads none too gently together.

“Oops,” Ruth says, drawing back a little. She appears fairly unbothered - fondly amused seems a more apt fit, to be honest - but Alex still shuts his eyes, flaring up in mortification. “No, Alex, come back,” she says softly, half a laugh hiding in her voice as her hands slide up his neck to cradle his jaw. “It’s alright. Come back.”

Alex cracks his eyes open, shooting a nervous glance at Peter who is still stationary by the sink. It had hardly been _exactly_ what he had intended from his vague attempt at being alluring, but Peter remains just as frozen in focus as before. Only, now, there’s something else softening his gaze; a sort of helpless fondness that drags him forward onto the balls of his feet and gentles his focus without dimming its intensity.

And Ruth has obligingly moved enough for his lips to reach her neck without serious injury to either of them, and these things give Alex enough encouragement to hide his flushed face by pressing a chaste kiss to the underside of Ruth’s jaw.

Her head tips back with a pleased hum that Alex can feel against his lips and she shifts slightly in his lap. Emboldened by this, he moves a little further down the pale, smooth column of her neck, coaxing tiny huffs of air from her open mouth. She presses closer to him, her hands clinging to his shoulders and her hips bearing down against his thigh, and Alex gets so caught up in the addictive responses he can chase from deep within Ruth that he almost forgets his audience until Peter lets out a breathy sigh that sends trembles down Alex’s spine.

He tilts his head enough to see Peter. Having given up on the dishcloth, the man is now clinging with white knuckles to the sink; it appears to be all that stands between him and an unceremonious collapse to the floor. The knowledge that it was they who had so completely already rendered him incapable of normal function runs through Alex like hot, golden power, from his head down to his fingertips bracketing Ruth’s waist, and half a triumphant smile creeps onto his face before he presses an open-mouthed kiss to Ruth’s neck just above the line of her shirt collar, keeping eye contact under his lashes with Peter all the while.

Peter’s eyes are burning into him as Ruth lets out a breathy moan and her hips stutter, just once, seeking pressure against Alex’s thigh. It briefly punches the breath out of Alex, her grip tightening on his shoulders and hips rolling under his palms and then, on top of that, the almost whine that slides from between Peter’s teeth. Alex pants into Ruth’s neck, teeth pressing absently against the soft skin there, and her nails abruptly dig into his shoulders with an urgent moan at the gentle graze.

And that’s - interesting. Rather extremely arousing, actually, if Alex is being honest, and if he can’t be that now then he never will. So, holding his breath for the slightest hint of pain or fright, Alex nips ever so gently at Ruth’s neck. He is immediately rewarded with another stuttering roll of her hips and Peter’s grip tightening yet further on the basin, which suits Alex just fine - so he does it again, littering Ruth’s marble skin with little kisses and bites until she’s writhing and panting under his ministrations.

Suddenly she pushes his head gently back and he looks up curiously - to quickly find that Peter has somehow made it to his knees beside the chair, and is willing to reward his little performance with a driving, deep kiss and a hand sweeping down his chest and his side and _oh,_ Alex is painfully hard. He almost hadn’t noticed. Now, though, with Peter’s broad palm settled on the flat of his stomach, just above his belt - now, Alex is no longer distracted by his lovers’ responses and entirely too aware of his own.

A reedy, breathy whine seems to echo in the small space between the three of them, and Alex realises with some embarrassment that he had made it. Peter prevents any attempt to stifle his sounds or hide his face by making a low, rumbling noise deep in his chest, almost a growl, that has Alex’s fingers impulsively tightening on Ruth’s waist. He’s quite powerless to do ought but meet Peter’s biting, desperate kisses with all the feeling his scattered brain can muster, and attempt rather half-heartedly to catch his breath in between.

“I love you,” Peter pants in between urgent kisses, and his voice is so wrecked, and there’s such desperation in it that Alex can’t help a brief high-pitched moan. “I love you both - so much - I-”

Ruth leans in and kisses him, sealing in the last of his agitated words. He seems to settle a little into something less frantic, as if he’d finally received confirmation with the gesture, and Alex moves one hand to settle over Peter’s sternum. He can feel Peter’s heartbeat running at half a hundred miles a minute under his thumb and there are suddenly far too many layers between them all and Alex cannot possibly bear it any longer.

Peter and Ruth break apart, foreheads leaning together but eyes sliding to Alex, when his hand fists tightly in Peter’s shirt and tugs. He can’t muster up anything but this: clinging to Peter’s shirt and staring in desperation at them both in the hopes that what he so urgently wants will somehow be conveyed through this alone.

It seems to work. “Upstairs?” Ruth inquires gently, and Alex nods fervently even as a bolt of fear runs through him, top to toe. He’d not really had time to think about it before, what with Ruth simply sitting in his lap and demanding his affection, but now Ruth and Peter are standing and turning to the steps and their bedroom and everything that entails - and Alex is rather suddenly frozen with fear, unhidden by Ruth’s skirts and oddly disconnected by the sudden lack of contact. He cannot quite make himself move, left staring after Peter and Ruth as they, hand in hand, turn away from him - but only for half a second that feels like a year, because then they move as one to reach out. Ruth is gazing over her shoulder, her eyes hot and heavy on him, and Peter’s hand is outstretched in unquestioning invitation, and they both look so bloody _fond_ that Alex abruptly forgets to be nervous or fretful or disconnected.

All he wants - all he has _ever_ wanted, he realises as he scrambles from his chair, tripping over his feet in his eagerness to slip his fingers into Peter’s hand and settle his palm on the small of Ruth’s back - is to be with them.

* * *

Alex wakes rather earlier than he had intended because of a curious inability to breathe properly. He shifts his head, attempting to free his nose from the mass of what turns out to be Ruth’s hair without opening his eyes, before settling back against her bare shoulder. A broad palm on his hip shifts slightly when he does, but Peter fails to stir when Alex doesn’t move far enough to disturb his grip and the soft breaths of his lovers continue unabated.

They’ve spent the night curled up like this, or in some permutation of this position, a fair few times before; usually with Peter in the middle and Ruth and Alex sprawled beside and half atop him. It occurs to Alex now that this could well be why he’s never woken up drowning in copper hair before - although, actually, now he thinks about it, it might also have something to do with Ruth not plaiting it last night so that it could fall about her shoulders and then around them both in a glittering fine curtain as she leaned in to kiss him, hips moving in a teasing rhythm - he stops that thought. Alex can’t help a slight frown, resisting the temptation to hide his embarrassed blush in the nearest available surface - this being Ruth’s bare skin, and therefore unlikely to help him much.

Peter shifts on Ruth’s other side, his hand sliding down Alex’s side to the small of his back and managing to press Alex’s hips into Ruth’s. An irritatingly familiar jolt of what feels uncomfortably like fear runs through him and Alex makes a deliberate effort to still himself slightly away from Ruth. Peter’s hand on him serves only as a reminder of Alex’s own touch: rather hesitant, and awkward from the familiar motions but unfamiliar angle, but still coaxing out moans and grunts and little breathless words of adoration-

Alex rather wishes it wasn’t common for his lovers to spend the early mornings attempting to iron the worries from his brow, but it appears not to be. He cracks one eye open and Ruth rewards him with a smile, trailing the thumb that had been pressing away his frown down the side of his face to cup his jaw. “Good morning, my love,” she says softly, in the slightly rasping tones of a voice not long roused from sleep, and she strokes the line of his cheekbone. “How are you, this fine day?”

Alex is -

Alex isn’t sure. There isn’t money in the world that could convince him to be anywhere but here, bathed in the grey light of early morning and wrapped up in the arms of those he loves the best. But he had also been about to make a daring escape from their bed without waking Ruth or Peter because the reminder of the night before had suddenly been far too much. Even now, he’s not quite sure where he wants to be.

“I’m not sure the day is that fine,” he says instead, smiling slightly and rather hoping she won’t press him on it.

It works a little; Ruth huffs and rolls her eyes and grins. “Pedant. Besides-” she raises one finger from his face to make a tiny circle at the room around them. “-seems pretty fine to me.”

Alex musters up an unconvincing smile. He wishes he could have her calm, could bottle it up and keep it for his own when he could best use it, but instead he is left with buckets of mingled joy and terror and guilt and love that overflow and spill onto Ruth and Peter too.

Ruth’s smile slides smoothly into a concerned sigh. “Oh, if I ever meet your aunt, Alex,” she says in a voice full of carefully controlled sadness and anger. “She and I shall have quite a few words.”

Alex closes his eyes against such emotion so close to his face. He’s not had anyone so ready and willing to fight for him since he was a small boy, and in truth he is not quite sure how to respond. “It isn’t just her fault, you know,” he says, because Aunt Edwina is, despite everything, his family, but his voice trembles slightly as he does and he tries very hard to focus on the slow and steady sweeps of the pad of Ruth’s thumb over his cheekbone.

“Even I might struggle to take up arms against the Church, darling,” Ruth points out, and Alex smiles in spite of himself. “But I would, if only I could work out how. If you asked.”

Alex opens his eyes again, searching her irises for insincerity and finding not a drop of it in her sharp gaze. Ruth has fought for everything she has ever wanted, from her independence to her right to live unmarried, even down to the bicycle that the salesman was rather unwilling to let her purchase. But it means an awful lot to be on that list of things Ruth has deemed worthy of her efforts, and it makes Alex feel tremendously cowardly for even thinking of running away from something he feels rather unable to live without, just because someone else might disapprove. Alex has had everything in his possession handed to him on a gilded platter; the only things he has ever had to make an effort to have and hold are Ruth and Peter, and they mean more to him than all else put together. He’d take up arms in their defence, too.

Something in him relaxes at this realisation and Ruth must notice, because a tense edge is smoothed from her bearing. “I might need - this,” Alex says hesitantly, gesturing between the pair of them at their words, floating in the bubble between their bodies. “Sometimes. But you needn’t fight the Church; the main battle is up here, in my head, but I am trying.”

Ruth beams at him, and helpless as he is he returns it. She leans in to kiss his forehead, her bare skin pressed against him shoulder to toe and against Peter in equal measure on her other side, and Alex’s heart sings with it. “That’s all we ask,” Ruth says, and Alex chases the warmth in her smile with his lips. His hand settles where her waist curves into her soft stomach, and he’ll never be quite satisfied with her corseted figure again - not when he could have smooth skin and rolling movement and little hisses of breath when he trails his fingers down her sensitive sides.

“Mmm, sleepin’,” Peter mumbles crossly into Ruth’s hair, clamping his arm tighter around Alex and Ruth to prevent their slight movements.

Alex muffles his giggles in Ruth’s shoulder as she grins wickedly. “So sorry, darling, did we wake you?” she inquires sweetly, freeing one hand to run it the length of Peter’s thigh, knee to hip and back again. “Were we disturbing you, when we were saying good morning? Enjoying the beautiful day?” Her voice lowers smoothly into something far more private, sending shivers down Alex’s spine as he gazes up at her in mindless adoration. “When Alex was kissing me, just inches from your face? Did that wake you up?”

There is a pause while Peter processes this, and Alex tries not to laugh again. “Yes. It did,” Peter says eventually, sounding much more awake and alert now.

Ruth bites her lip, grinning. “I _am_ sorry. We shall be quiet, won’t we, Alex?”

Alex nods, even though Peter is yet to remove his face from the nape of Ruth’s neck and so cannot see that or the uncontrollable joy that accompanies it. “You’ll try,” Peter says, hand idly stroking Alex’s back.

“We can be quiet!” Ruth objects - quite loudly, Alex is half inclined to point out.

Peter finally sits up enough to see them both, head propped up in one hand. “Perhaps _you_ can,” he tells her, “but I’m not sure about him.” Alex almost objects - there’s a slight frisson of fear that goes with it, that perhaps he’s doing it wrong or will somehow get them discovered - but then Peter winks at him and squeezes his hip gently. “I suppose I shall just have to stay awake and see what you get up to, then.”

Ruth presents her face to him for a kiss and needs not wait long to receive one. “You’re a saint, darling,” she tells him archly, eyes dancing with amusement. “Putting up with all this terrible noise.”

Peter grins, leaning over to kiss Alex - all stubble and sweetness. “I’m very open to rewards,” he says, semi-seriously, and Alex discovers that it’s rather lovely to be so caught up in skin and bodies and laughter that he doesn’t think of anything else at all.

* * *

July represents a return to normality. The myriad young Mudges and their classmates are kept on just long enough to pull pounds of potatoes from the thick, cloying mud and give the horses one last nose rub before, at long last, Alex has his farm and his lovers to himself again. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and Alex is both processing cherries and preventing Peter from eating them - the latter with rather less success than the former, Peter having discovered his weakness for sweet-sticky fruit flavoured kisses and using it ruthlessly to his advantage.

Ruth steps out of the farmhouse, frowning at an open letter in one hand and using the other to swat Peter with a newspaper for being a nuisance. Alex tilts his head up at her. “All well?” he says, with only slightly forced calm.

She hums, not unhappily, and drops the newspaper in Peter’s lap as she settles between them on the bench in the yard, back against the sun-warmed stone. “Yes; Miss Bexleigh continues to be tremendously happy in her new position, although I’ve a mind to drop her a line or two about being careful. She is living in this man’s house, after all, and I do worry about how private she keeps her correspondence.”

Peter frowns, licking red juice from his fingertips. “She’s not having an affair with her chum’s husband, is she?”

“By the sounds of it, not the chum’s _husband,_ no,” Ruth says with deliberate emphasis, still frowning at the neat lettering criss-crossing the page, and Alex can’t quite hide his smile at Peter’s startled amusement. “I will say something, I think,” Ruth goes on as she folds the letter back into its envelope. “I don’t suppose you know a Mr Frederick Fitzwater, do you, Alex?”

Alex furrows his brow, thinking. In truth, it’s harder every day to keep a hold on the intricate details of his life before the farm; knowledge of vague society acquaintances or the rules of bridge (neither of which had been his strongest suits even at the height of his socialite career) are now almost entirely lost to him, and he cannot quite help a general sentiment of _good riddance._ Being out and about in the world as he currently is, come rain or shine, makes everything feel so much more real than ever before, and in consequence there’s a dream-like quality shrouding his recollections of the interminable, monotonous days spent in his aunt’s shadow, greeting an endless parade of similar faces and people and trying desperately to be interested.

Having said all that, he thinks he does remember a Frederick Fitzwater - broad in the shoulders with a booming voice to match and a sort of boisterous energy Alex had found rather intimidating. “Yes, I believe so. A horse-and-hounds sort of chap, you know? He drank rather more than he ought, but that only made him rather noisy.” Ruth nods, satisfied, and it’s another tiny window into the things over which Ruth frets and that Alex hasn’t given a thought to - but then, however trapped Alex had felt in Sussex, he had escaped on his own two feet and with very little actual difficulty. Ruth and Elsie and Mrs Fitzwater and countless others like them could hardly dream of the ease with which Alex hopped on a train and became quite entirely independent.

The thought is a little saddening, so he chases it with the next brighter thing that comes into his head. “Rather handsome, I thought.”

It does the trick; Ruth sets the letter aside at last as she laughs, smiling up at him. “Oh, did you?” she says, eyes dancing, and Alex grins back.

“Broad shoulders, you know - always appealing.”

Ruth hums in amused agreement, knocking their boots together where they stretch out into the yard. Dartmoor was good for them all, but Alex feels a hundred times more comfortable in his skin after a little time away from the world to sort his head and his heart in sweet companionable isolation. He’s rather less paranoid now, too; he can sit outside, a little too close to them both, and enjoy the sunshine of the moment more than he frets about somehow being discovered. Once one has been talked into washing fleeces half-naked in a river, and then laying the wool out to dry on the sun-warmed grass, and then laying out themselves on cool, damp wool with nothing but the wind between their bare skin and the sunshine, with no-one for miles to see - after all that, bumping sleeved elbows on a bench and idly discussing the male physique cannot quite hold the same terror it once did.

Ruth nudges Peter. “You’re very quiet - do you disagree? Prefer a slimmer silhouette on a gent?”

“I like an Alex-shaped silhouette,” Peter says with studied calm and just a touch of reproach, popping a cherry in his mouth to excuse his further silence on the topic, and Ruth scoffs, rolling her eyes.

“You’re not jealous, are you? You daft sod - Alex, what adjective would you use to discuss Peter’s shoulders?”

“Well,” Alex says, raising one eyebrow as he looks back at Ruth - and Peter, though the man’s trying to be terribly subtle about watching them - and sharing in her exasperated amusement. “The word _broad_ does come to mind; what do you think?”

“Very much the same, sir,” Ruth says, giving Peter a significant look. He offers them a sheepish grin and a shrug, and Ruth removes the bowl of cherries from his lap with an amused sigh. “Honestly, the pair of you.”

“Oi!” Alex objects without much heat. “I don’t see how that was my fault.”

“No, dear,” Ruth soothes dryly. “You’re doing a delightful job of coming to terms with who you are and what you want - only look what it did to Peter. Might be a nice change if you could both get your heads on straight _at the same time._ ”

Peter catches Alex’s eye and sends them both into giggles. “Sorry, Ruth,” Peter says eventually, pressing his forehead briefly to her temple and making her smile a little harder for her to conceal. “How come you’re so much better at all this, then?”

It’s an idle question, more a product of Peter’s amusement than actual curiosity, but Ruth’s hands still on the cherries in her lap and Alex finds himself rather interested in the serious answer she seems inclined to give. “I suppose I’ve had rather less to - come to terms with,” she says, looking thoughtfully into the distance. “Falling in love with charming gentlemen is more or less par for the course, I’d say, although two at once and to quite this extent was something of a surprise.”

“When did you know?” Alex asks, busying himself with cherry-processing to avoid their gazes. It hardly matters, of course, but Alex equally longs to know how long, exactly, he has been theirs.

“That I loved you both?” Ruth clarifies, before tilting her head and humming thoughtfully at his nod. “Late November, December time, I think,” she says, nudging Alex’s foot. “Although I was rather smitten with you, Alex, by the time you left, and with Peter by the time you came back. He had a month’s head-start, but you made up for it admirably,” she explains to Peter, leaning into his side, and he rewards her with a sunshine smile and a kiss to her hair. “I had managed to persuade myself I was only in love one at a time, while we were in different counties; bit harder when we were all together again.”

“I never knew,” Alex says softly. He hadn’t had even the slightest idea, and he rather dislikes the image he now has of Ruth, alone and troubled and trying not to be in love.

She snorts. “I should hope not! I certainly didn’t want you to. Risky business, falling in love with one’s employer, or even one’s fellow employee.” Ruth soothes this little sadness by rubbing their ankles together and continuing to idly lean into Peter - the reminder of the Candlemas argument and how they had all begun still stings a little.

“That’s when I knew,” Peter says a little hesitantly. “I mean, I knew about - what and who I wanted - before then, but. You two. We had our fight, and I realised what I wanted just in time to lose it.”

Alex stands abruptly, Ruth barely managing to rescue the bowl of cherries from his lap before he has one arm wrapped around their shoulders and his hand cradling the back of Peter’s neck, the other propping him up on Ruth’s knee. Peter tastes like cherries and surprise, warmed by the bright summer sun, and Alex squeezes his eyes shut to press all of his apologies and affection and slight sweet sorrow into the kiss.

Peter, when Alex pulls back, is smiling in soft understanding. “I know,” he says, before Alex even has a chance to put his atonement into words. “I know.”

“If you had thrown all the cherries on the floor,” Ruth admonishes as he sits back down and accepts his bowl, “I’d have been very cross with you.”

“Extenuating circumstances?” Alex offers, and Ruth rolls her eyes fondly.

“Oh, alright,” she says, twisting against Peter to offer him her own apology.

They work quietly for a moment, Peter idly thumbing through the newspaper as the pile of cherry stones grows steadily. “It was Boxing Day for me,” Alex says. “I had some - confusing emotions about you kissing each other.”

“ _Confusing emotions_ could be the title of your autobiography, Alex,” Peter says dryly, and Alex laughs.

“Rather. But it feels as though I’ve never _not_ loved you, these days - does that make sense?” Memories of Alex’s days at university, of meeting Ruth off the train, of listening to Peter sing a shanty on that bright Plymouth morning - all are now suffused with a great, all-encompassing fondness, as if he’d been head-over-heels since the very moment of shaking Peter’s hand their very first Michaelmas term, or raising his hat at Ruth’s grin just ten months ago.

She gives him that very same broad, bright grin now. “Yes, I dare say it does.”

They’ve enough cherries to keep them in pies and jam all winter, now, and Alex feels a warm glow of satisfaction spread through him. It isn’t only how much they’ve produced and how tremendously well they’ve done for their first year of farming - although both are rather impressive - but also the tangible reminder that such a supply presents. They have prepared for the winter; one they intend to spend together, working the farm they love and doing as they please, and this will, with time, be but one of many. The cherries here are a promise of time together to come, and Alex cannot wait.

“This Agadir thing isn’t resolved yet,” Peter sighs, frowning at the newspaper. “Keeps saying things about protection of liberties and warships in the Mediterranean.”

“Has no one considered giving Morocco back to the Moroccans?” Ruth yawns, settling her head on Peter’s shoulder and blinking sun-sleepy eyes.

Alex smiles, rubbing a thumb over her kneecap. “Ruth Goodman, diplomat extraordinaire,” he says fondly.

She offers him a sweet, closed-eyes smile. “That sounds about right. I do a good enough job of keeping the peace on this farm, don’t I?”

“Oh, splendid,” Alex confirms, grinning out over the Devon landscape. All green and rolling hills, he couldn’t feel further from the sands of North Africa; and though Peter offers the paper one last frown before folding it away to smile in helpless fondness at Ruth, there’s also a large thumbprint of cherry juice staining the article deep purple and Alex finds it tremendously easy to ignore a foreign crisis in favour of a cherry-stained future on their farm.

* * *

One of Mr Mudge’s younger sons returns from his new, modern job in London in time for the harvest with a tripod under one arm and an enormous film camera beneath the other. It’s an event that causes consternation, gossip and delight in Morwellham; on the one hand, to be filmed is an honour! We, the people of Morwellham might be famous in the city! And on the other, we never ‘ad nothing like this in my day and it’s intruding on our privacy.

Alex can’t help but find the whole thing rather amusing - leave it to the village to render of a molehill an entire alpine resort - until he discovers that Nathan Mudge intends to film all the farms in his documentary of modern farming, and that this would include Alex’s own.

It isn’t the novelty that puts him off. It’s actually rather fascinating, and Nathan is quite happy to let Alex have a look at the contraption and ask interested questions and almost press buttons - which, admittedly, does make Nathan flutter anxiously about the extremely delicate and expensive kit under Alex’s untrained fingertips. Nor is it really the potential for judgement of his amateur farming, although Alex is slightly insulted that the young Mudge thinks it is.

“It wouldn’t even be for that long, honest,” Nathan implores as Alex frowns at the camera set up between them to photograph the churchyard. “Just to film you harvest one strip of oats, and take a few pictures of the three of you after. Nothing to it.” Alex tries and fails to not pull a face, and Nathan Mudge sighs. “Think it over, would you?” he says, collecting his contraption up in his arms and returning to his family.

Ruth announces her presence at his side by tucking her hand into his elbow and Peter ambles out of the Church behind them to stand at her shoulder. “What’s this, considering a career on the screen?” she says with a smile.

The frown which their presence had briefly chased away returns with full force. “Rather the opposite,” Alex says, starting their usual Sunday morning meander back to the farm. “I’m not sure it’s quite my thing.”

“All the other farms are doing it,” Peter points out. He’s quite neutral about it, not accusing at all, but Alex still chews his lip.

“Do you want to? Be filmed, I mean.”

Peter shrugs as he peels off his jacket, now far enough from the tutting old ladies to do so. Ruth lets her spare hand drop between them, brushing the thin linen of his shirtsleeves with her thin fingertips. “It matters very little to me either way, to be honest. I simply can’t help but notice that it really does seem to matter to you, darl-” Peter cuts himself off halfway through the endearment, flicking his gaze over his shoulder at the thankfully empty lane behind them.

Alex winces, looking at his feet, and Ruth rubs her thumb over his arm. “Is that why?” she asks quietly.

He shrugs, which is confirmation enough. “I’ll be more careful, Alex, promise,” Peter says apologetically, and Alex shoots him a tiny, but forgiving, smile.

“The camera can’t hear us, anyway,” Ruth points out. “We really would be quite safe.”

“I just hate-” Alex stops and huffs in frustration. It’s hard to say, exactly, why taking their behaviour down permanently on celluloid fills him with quite such unassailable dread. “I worry that this will condemn us anyway,” he says weakly. “If we are - pinned down, like this. Publicly.”

“It will just be as we are in front of the village,” Ruth says, frowning. He knows it isn’t so much the not-filming that bothers her; something is eating at Alex, and she will wrest it from him come hell or high water. “You know that, Alex, so what is it really?”

The hedgerows, high about their ears, hum with insects going about their business in the sunshine, untroubled by the slight clouds scudding across the heavens. There’s breeze enough to catch Peter’s wild-grown curls and brush the loose strands of copper collected behind Ruth’s ear, and Alex’s eyes are sunsore when he closes them on a sigh. “It will not just be the village, in the end,” he says, slow and measured. “We will be inviting the whole world onto our farm to peer at our life here and ask questions and poke and press and pry, and I will not have it.”

“Will you not,” Ruth says, sharp and arch.

Alex winces. “I do not want it,” he corrects, and she settles. Peter deems them safe from onlookers and catches Ruth’s hand in his own, swinging idly between them.

“People will not press the matter, Alex,” Peter says with soft confidence. “They will see three farmers, and assume that some of us are married and the other an employee, or family member. They will not be right, but that is none of our concern. I hardly think anyone is going to pay enough attention to us to think anything more of it at all.”

Alex sighs, turning to them. “Does it really bother you? That I don’t want to be photographed?” he pleads.

Ruth wraps her hand a little more snugly around his arm. “Only because it bothers you, dear heart. But if you don’t want it, we shan’t do it.”

Alex almost wants to object - he isn’t _bothered_ that he doesn’t want to be filmed, he just doesn’t want it - but it’s a glorious day and Peter has moved on to whether this weather will stick, anyway, because there’ll be no filming if it doesn’t, and it isn’t an important distinction.

He’s grateful, later, that he hadn’t, because it turns out to be not quite true.

Mrs Westford, now rather grown children in tow, drops in for tea with her cousin, and Ruth looks rather too charming for Alex to form polite and coherent thought, with a nearly-toddling baby in her lap pulling at her soft hair. He tries - without much success - to avoid this vision of a perhaps-if-he’s-tremendously-lucky future by following Peter and the boys into the yard; he receives in its stead Peter listening intently as the children attempt to explain football to him with the least clarity possible, and then he and Alex are having rings run about them by two extremely determined lads. In the end, Peter grabs the ball and runs off towards the fields with it, pretending incomprehension of the rules as he is hunted down by two shrill children. Alex cannot help his smile as Peter returns, the eldest clinging to the football and hanging like a sack over one shoulder as the younger grips his shin, koala-like and laughing hysterically. Peter smiles beatifically back, adjusting his grip on a wriggling Will, and the perhaps-please-perhaps future is so sharply seared into Alex’s vision that, for a moment, all he can do is stop and stare and desperately want.

Mrs Westford collects up her children with an indulgent smile - very good of her, since by the time she and Ruth have finished their tea Alex has James on his shoulders in an attempt to keep the ball out of reach of his brother and Will looks liable to make an attempt at climbing Peter to get it back - and as soon as her skirts have vanished around the corner Ruth presses up on her tiptoes to kiss Alex and then Peter in quick succession. “It is tremendously difficult,” she informs them, “to be excessively happy and unable to tell those that love one about it.”

“Sorry,” Peter says. One hand settles on her shoulder, the other twines its fingers slightly with Alex’s.

Ruth raises an eyebrow. “Your fault, is it? Anyway, Maggie’s had Nathan Mudge take their picture and she’s brought me a copy for the family album, though quite why I’ve got it and she hasn’t I really don’t-”

“You have a family album?” Peter says.

Ruth looks momentarily surprised, and then she smiles. “I can get it out, if you’d like.”

* * *

Ruth’s family, it appears, were great proponents of semi-annual seaside photographs; it is therefore possible for Peter and Alex, poring over the small cards in the great leather tome, to track Ruth’s growing from a small, grumpy baby to a fidgeting, blurry child, and then on to a slight, sharp-grinning young lady. She can, around production of their dinner, name each and every family member and their relation to her on command, and it’s exceedingly obvious that Ruth is deeply familiar with the images.

“How many cousins have you got?” Peter asks incredulously. Births, deaths and marriages have been recorded in the back of the album in a neat hand, and Peter keeps flipping between the pages in an effort to keep track.

“Too many even to count,” Ruth laughs, and Alex watches her swirl about their little kitchen with grace and ease. “I ought really to go and see some of them soon, for something that isn’t a wedding, christening or funeral, but I’m fairly sure I don’t want to leave you two for a month.”

“Think what we might do to your kitchen,” Alex says, pushing away the promise of pain that comes with the idea of four whole weeks without Ruth.

“Ooh,” Peter says over Ruth’s chuckles. “We could have carpetbag steak and mussels and all the other stuff Ruth says we can’t afford.”

Alex looks in pretend horror at Peter, and then at Ruth. “You can’t leave me,” he says, catching her hand as she passes and gazing imploringly up at her confusion. “Peter will poison me with poorly-cooked seafood.”

“Hey!” Peter says, betrayed, as Ruth laughs. He prods Alex in the ribs, which doesn’t do much to stop his laughter, but then also gives him an amused smile and a kiss. “But, also, please don’t leave us. We adore you.”

“Oh, alright then,” Ruth says, pretending to think about it but smiling rather too hard to be even slightly convincing. “Haven’t the pair of you any photographs, anyway?”

Peter pulls a face. “One or two. My family barely had the money to send my brothers and me to school when I was small, and then we all went off to university. I’ve a graduation photo, but nothing like this.” He runs his fingers reverently down the edges of the pages before him, and Alex suddenly understands why Peter had been so fascinated by a whole book of history and holidays and family. Peter does not often talk of his family, but Alex knows they had had less than auspicious beginnings and that Peter’s not seen them in a while. To have and hold the evidence of a vast family, comfortably well-off and frequently collected before a lens - of course Peter had wanted to see the album.

“I’ve a photo of the pair of us at the graduation ball,” Alex offers, and - as intended - Peter’s brief longing is brushed aside in favour of a grin.

“Have you really?” he says, leaning back in his chair and turning his whole chest towards Alex to capture him with the full force of his pleasure. “I didn’t realise there were any of you and I.”

“Do you look tremendously dashing?” Ruth teases.

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Peter says. “Camera couldn’t resist us. Have you got the photo here?”

Alex gestures absently at the stairs. “It’s in the black box in my room.”

“Right,” Peter says, using Alex’s shoulder to push himself to his feet. “And that’s...under the bed?”

“Didn’t you stay in his room while Elsie was here? Shouldn’t you know?” Ruth queries, half-smiling already.

Alex ignores her. “It’s in the wardrobe, I believe.”

“You definitely ought to know,” Ruth points out as Peter heads upstairs, and Alex rolls his eyes.

“Well, I’ve not had much opportunity to spend time there of late; not since _someone_ declared her bed far superior to all others and required Peter and I to abandon our own rooms.” In truth, he minds it not one bit - as Ruth, laughing triumphantly, is quite aware. There’s something rather special, Alex finds, about shutting the animals away for the night with Peter and then creeping together into the quiet, dark house and up the stairs; into the room where Ruth is stretched out on the bed they share, bathed in soft golden light as she plaits her long, fine hair; where she pretends she isn’t waiting for them and receives them like a queen. To be _allowed_ into her bed, her space, her arms, is a pleasure of which Alex will never tire.

Peter trots back down with his eyes on the envelope in his hands, sliding his fingertips absently over the small of Ruth’s back as he passes and settling back in his chair with one arm now wrapped around Alex’s shoulders. “We aren’t dancing in this photo, are we?” he says, flicking through the small stack.

“No. Not with each other, and exceedingly poorly,” Alex says in response to Ruth’s turn away from the stove, face lit up with delight and a question balanced on her tongue. She pouts and returns to the pot.

“Here we are,” Peter says happily - much more happily than some might say that the image deserves. The photo is of the pair of them, dolled up in their finest glad rags, sitting on a couch at the edge of the ballroom. They are almost unrecognisable to Alex: the young men here have had their curls combed and pomaded and swept straight back from faces far less tanned and weatherbeaten than they are now. Peter’s muscles have filled out since, thanks to a few years of hard work, and even Alex’s younger self is rather skinnier than he is presently. What is immediately recognisable is the pose: Peter, elbows on his knees, and Alex, leaning into his space with an arm propped up on the chair arm between them. Escaping from the dance and the dreary elite conversation to talk quietly together with barely twelve inches between their bowed heads. Alex remembers spending much of that evening this way, but it is more than that. They sit like that even now - are presently, in fact: heads together, close enough to brush hands with every gesture, leaning into each other.

Only now- “Oh, my beautiful boys,” Ruth says, soft and smiling, over their shoulders. Alex opens his arms and she settles sideways on his lap, arm overlapping Peter’s where it rests over his shoulders. “Gosh, don’t you look young. Lovely buttonholes - what are they, roses?”

Peter nods. “I went out in the early morning and bought two matching white roses from Covent Garden, and when I presented them to my beau he said _oh, thanks Peter; I hadn’t sorted that out yet._ ”

Alex closes his eyes and lets his forehead thump into Ruth’s shoulder as she laughs. He does, now, remember Peter presenting him a little nervously with a flower for his buttonhole, but he genuinely hadn’t thought anything of it or seen anything more in the gesture. “You didn’t really - already - did you?” he manages over Ruth’s giggling.

Peter squeezes his shoulder, and is smiling fondly at him when Alex opens his eyes again. “Not really - or, not that I was aware of. I knew I liked you a great deal, and that I wanted us to have matching flowers, but I hadn’t quite managed to put it all together yet.” Peter looks back at the photo in his hand, turning his affection on their past selves. “But you wore something I’d given you, and it was like a little part of you was mine. And you tied my bowtie for me, and every stuffed shirt in the hall reminded me of you.”

Ruth strokes Alex’s hair back from his temples and Alex leans into her hand with a self-deprecating smile. He remembers fussing with the tie, knuckles brushing the soft skin of Peter’s neck and feeling his pulse thrumming beneath, but truly hadn’t thought anything of the curious curling satisfaction from having done so. “My dear, dear boys,” Ruth says, smiling. “Enacting high romance without even noticing.”

Alex ducks his head, grinning, and Peter leans in to press a laughing kiss to his temple. They had been young and exceptionally blind, but the idea of time wasted doesn’t sting so terribly now that Alex has the happy ending within his grasp.

“Anything else good in your photograph collection, Alex?” Peter says, setting the photo of the pair of them aside and picking up the rest.

Alex shrugs. “I really don’t remember. I haven’t looked at them in some time.”

Peter shuffles through them idly, past an awkward and gangly Alex, aged about thirteen, with his Aunt Edwina and three sulky cousins; past gown, mortarboard and degree; past-

Ruth leans over and plucks the oldest photograph from the top of the pile, settling back into Alex’s chest. She flips it over to read the looping scrawl on the back that Alex knows so well, although he rather suspects she knows who sits within the frame of this image already. “Your father looks like you,” she says softly, looking at the picture and not him - for which he is rather grateful.

Alex tightens his grip on her waist, pulling her more snugly against him, instead of answering that. She’s quite right; the man in the photograph standing behind mother and child has hair perhaps a little less inclined to curl wildly and an angle to his smile that a ten-year-old Alex could never quite copy in the mirror, but barring those details it could be him a few years from now. His mother looks proud and faintly austere, but she has given up her hand for baby Alex to cling to while he looks adoringly up at her face. His main memory of her is the softness of skirts and touch and voice as it formed lullabies he now cannot recall.

Peter rubs his shoulder gently and Alex swallows past the lump in his throat. “Yes. My aunt said so. I think, sometimes, it upset her; my father’s brother, her husband, died in the Boer War when my cousins and I were very small, and I grew up looking rather like them both.”

“That must have been difficult for you all,” Ruth says gently, and Alex nods sharply and rests his head against her shoulder. “May I keep your photographs in my album?” she asks after a moment. “Any of yours, Peter, too.”

Alex leans back to look at her, but she appears quite serious. “In your family’s album?” he queries.

Ruth smiles, soft and gentle and a little nervous. “Your family too, if you’d like them.”

He blinks, stunned. Alex has given up on his own family, now, but it hadn’t quite occurred to him that he could have a different one instead - or that he would be invited into one.

“Ruth,” Peter says, a touch of amusement sneaking into his tone. “Are you proposing to us?”

She laughs and pats his thigh. “One knee, darling; you deserve nothing less. Nothing quite so public, I’m afraid, but. If you’d like.”

Alex manages to break through his surprise and collects up Peter’s hand and Ruth’s in one of his own. “Yes,” he says softly. “Please. I should like that very much.”

* * *

Alex is almost glad, in the end, that Nathan Mudge films the oat harvest. He’s so ridiculously proud of what the three of them have achieved together, this past year, that he’s half minded to sing their success from the rooftops and send an ear to his cousin as a wedding present.

Peter sends him a bright grin as he passes, collecting up neat sheaves, and Alex’s heart stutters in his chest. He’s so ridiculously in love that it’s almost tempting to sing about that, too.

Ruth had kissed them both and then set about securing their photographs in the album immediately, forcing Peter to get up and serve their dinner so that his and Alex’s place in her family could be finalised as soon as possible. Alex and his parents smile out beside him and Peter, immortalised in a private conversation; opposite, two young men with degrees and proud eyes. But there had been a gap beneath the recent photograph of the Westfords, and no photos of Ruth or Alex or Peter beyond the age of about twenty-one.

And Alex has a _family album_ now, and Ruth’s mam has written several times now to say that she likes the sound of the young men Ruth lives with but would quite like to like the look of them, too, and Alex gets over his terror of discovery long enough to stand before the camera with the people he loves.

It hardly hurts, either, that Nathan Mudge is absolutely delighted.

“That’s the last row,” Ruth tells him, quite redundantly as Alex can certainly see that for himself, but it matters not a bit; Alex gives in to temptation and hops off the reaper binder and strides over to catch her up in his arms. She giggles in startled delight into his neck as he spins her around in triumph, stumbling slightly as he sets her down. It’s tremendously tempting to lean in and kiss her upturned and smiling face, but - the camera.

Something in him must tense, because Ruth runs her hand down his arm in a settling gesture and pulls back a little. She looks a little - disappointed, almost - so he turns his head away from the camera and quite quietly says, “I’m trying very hard not to kiss you.”

She laughs and steps away. “Thank you, that’s very considerate,” she teases as Peter wanders over to sling an arm about Alex’s shoulders.

“That’s about it for our farming year,” Peter says. There’s a glow of satisfaction about the man that Alex can’t help but lean into, pressing into Peter’s side.

“Barring the last snippets of photographic evidence, yes,” Ruth says, beaming. “I’m tremendously proud of you boys.”

“And of you, Ruth,” Alex adds. “You - both of you - you’re simply invaluable.”

Peter squeezes his shoulders, and Ruth blushes prettily, and it’s probably for the best that Nathan Mudge interrupts to arrange his photograph. Alex is altogether too inclined to gather them in his arms and kiss them senseless.

* * *

Nathan brings round a copy of their photograph a week later. Alex is the only one in the house when he calls, and so it falls to him to accept the framed image.

They look so austere in the photograph. Nathan had instructed them to assume serious expressions, but the three people behind the glass look so much less joyous than Alex knows they had been that he almost doesn’t recognise them. But it is a good picture: well-arranged, with Ruth sitting upon the cartbed between Alex and Peter, and all three of them proud and tall. They look-

They look like real farmers, and that, more than anything, makes Alex set his shoulders and smile. “Thank you, Nathan.”

He nods, and then shuffles his feet awkwardly. “There was one more. If you wanted it. It’s the only copy, promise, so if you don’t- Anyway. Here.”

Alex looks nervously from Nathan’s resolute expression to the overturned photograph held quivering in the space between them. Tentatively, he takes it; turns it over; stops.

His mind can’t quite take in, all at once, the image he has been given. He picks out details only: the way Ruth’s legs have swung beneath the cart a little as she laughs; Peter’s left hand jammed in his pockets in self-satisfaction; the straw clinging to Alex’s hair above his amused mock-scowl; and running through the middle of the photograph, the chain of their joined hands.

Alex remembers the moment. Nathan had arranged them and then gone to fuss with his camera, and to pass the time Peter had removed the handful of straw he had been keeping in his pocket for this very purpose and scattered it artfully over Alex’s head. Nathan must have taken a picture to test the framing, or something, because this perfectly candid photograph is of the moment a few seconds later, when Alex had feigned crossness with Peter’s smug delight and Ruth had captured their hands and laughed.

This is how Alex remembers the oat harvest, not the taxidermied farmers of the first photo. He remembers the curve of Peter’s smile and the way the light shone on Ruth’s hair and how wonderful it had felt to stand there in sunshine and success and love. He remembers the triumph and the joy and the brief irritation with the temperamental reaper-binder contraption. He remembers holding hands and laughing.

Alex looks up at Nathan, wringing his hands. Nathan looks even more nervous than Alex, but this does little to assuage the leaden pit of terror that has taken up residency in his stomach. “You - you don’t...mind?” Alex manages at last, unwilling to give name to the nebulous secret contained in the photograph.

Nathan blinks. “Don’t you?” he says. “I didn’t mean to take it then, honest, and you’ve got the only copy. I promise. I’m not here to put you in danger, I just thought you might like it.”

Alex stares at the photograph in his hands. “I do,” he says softly. “I like it very much, thank you. Only - we had been keeping rather quiet.”

“Oh,” Nathan says. “I know. And you had probably better. But-” he sighs. “Dad ain’t never said anything, but he was right cross with Tilda when she made a comment about Ruth’s not being married. And he was dead keen on it being your farm, so’s you could all go to Dartmoor.” Alex stands in stunned silence, entirely frozen, whilst Nathan jitters with nervous energy. His fingers tap against his arms, his legs; he draws in the dust with the toe of his boot; and Alex stands, perfectly still. “He had a sister,” Nathan adds quietly. “Aunt Dot never married, but she lived for a bit with a Miss Hall. There was some funny business when I was a lad and she had to go away. Dad didn’t like that at all.”

Alex unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Do many people know?” he whispers.

Nathan shakes his head. “Just me and dad, I think. But you’ve a Mr Mudge on your side, now, and that name means things round here.” He offers Alex a smile and nudges the brim of his hat as he turns away. “You’ll be alright.”

* * *

He leaves the photographs, side by side, upon the table for Peter and Ruth to return to. Ruth traces the line of their arms with one careful finger, and mirrors Alex’s look of concern as Peter abruptly trots upstairs.

She crosses the room to where he fidgets by the stove and insinuates herself into the space between his front and the stove until he has no choice but to wrap his arms about her. “It’s beautiful,” she whispers, face resting on his shoulder. “It’s the most precious photograph in the world.”

Alex presses his nose into her hair and breathes deeply. “I’m glad you like it as much as I do,” he mumbles, and feels her smile through his shirt.

Peter has a book in his hands on his return and he presents it to them both at a distance, arm extended as if the book - or perhaps Alex and Ruth - will bite him if he holds it closer. “Here,” he says gruffly. “I wasn’t sure when I would show you, but. Here.”

Alex unwinds one arm to take the small, leather-bound tome and Ruth opens it between them. It’s not a book, exactly, but a sketchbook; inside, in careful pencil, are sheep and wildflowers and the pony. There’s Tom and Prince, pulling the cart; and there’s Boo with his head upright and proud; and Alex and Ruth, always Alex and Ruth. Alex frowning at a ditch, and Ruth pegging out laundry on her tiptoes, and the pair of them giggling together over the stove. They appear on almost every page, in some form or another. There’s even a few messy sketches of them kissing, or of hands wandering, but Ruth skims through them all in silence until she reaches the last used page. Peter must have drawn this in the past few days. It’s of Alex and Ruth attempting to rescue an unfortunately tangled ball of wool, and they’re grinning at each other, sitting in opposite chairs, with Ruth neatly rolling a ball from the cat’s cradle mass wrapped around Alex’s fingers. Peter has drawn them with such tenderness that Alex can feel his love from here, dripping from the pages.

“Peter…” Alex manages softly.

“I’ll stop if you’re worried it’ll be found, or if you don’t like it-” Peter says quickly, defensively.

“Don’t you dare,” Ruth says, mild but firm, as her eyes flit over the drawing. “Peter, it’s wonderful.”

He steps closer hesitantly. “Really?”

“Yes,” Alex says, carefully juggling the book with Ruth so that he can pull Peter into their huddle. “I love it, and so does Ruth.”

“Good,” Peter says, slumping into them. “I know it worries you, sometimes, but I’ve always wanted us - written down. Or drawn out, I suppose, but _on paper._ So that it’s real and we existed, the three of us together; so that maybe, someday, someone will find it when we’re long gone and know that we had a place in history, and it was ours, and we loved it. And maybe there’ll be some future graduating gent, like you and I were, who might see us and think _perhaps I should be a little more obvious with my gift of flowers_.” Alex huffs a laugh and Peter smiles, running his hand down Ruth’s arm. “We can’t tell people now,” he continues softly. “But I can put us on paper and give us to people like us, a hundred years from now, and I can tell everyone just how much I love you just as much as I want to - but not yet. This, and that photo, and the fact that we put our photographs in Ruth’s album - it’s the evidence that we existed, and I want that. Because I love you, and this is the little bit of Devon and of history and of everything that is and was and will be that is _ours_.”

* * *

In a valley, in Devon, it is raining. The mist has coiled up off the river in clouds that look too tangible to enter and the grey and angry heavens are well and truly open. A young man steps out of his cottage, one hand jamming his hat onto his head as he winces against the onslaught of weather and the other holding a bucket of kitchen waste. He begins to make his lonely, weary way, when a hand stretches out into the rain and spins him, pulling him back. The young man goes willingly, grinning as he leans down to kiss his lady good morning before she starts work, too.

Another man joins them in the doorway for his own kisses, and then they’re outside, ducking their heads against the rain. They push each other into puddles and laugh, watched all the while from the doorway.

“Don’t get too wet, will you boys,” Ruth calls from the cottage.

“We won’t be long, not in this weather,” Peter replies, turning as he goes to offer her a smile. His hair is already quite soaked under the deluge, but they’re both grinning brightly at her.

“Half an hour, that’s all,” Alex adds.

Ruth pretends to look stern around a smile. “See that it is.”

Peter stomps through the wet farmyard and Alex heads out to the fields. Physically, he’s an awfully long way away from his blood relations, out here in Devon, and emotionally yet further estranged. He hasn’t anyone to question his decisions or correct his behaviour; he never even considers upholding his family name.

He looks over his shoulder at Peter, talking intently to the geese, and the door to the cottage - still open, allowing Ruth’s bright singing to sound over the rain. Alex is a long way from his relations, but not at all far from his family, and he turns to the rain-damp cows with a grin that he cannot, at present, seem to shake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't know where to begin, now that i've finished.
> 
> i suppose with my very oscar-acceptance-esque thanks: to n3ongold3n, for unerring support and a stream of kindness and beautiful art, without which i probably wouldn't write for this fandom; to combefaerie, for your love and enthusiasm and for being my biggest fan (i'm your biggest fan, so it balances out), without whom it is no exaggeration to say that i probably wouldn't write at all; and to you, for reading.  
> this is the longest thing i have ever written - certainly that i have ever completed - and my first attempt at multi-chaptered fiction in a good many years. I'm proud of myself, so i hope you have enjoyed reading this story at least half as much as i have enjoyed writing it.


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